Having coached kids programming, I have my mind totally blown by how smart kids are and how fast they can catch up things here in Silicon Valley. Within just 1 hour or a day, they threw very good questions and show strong personalities through asking for help to get their ideas up on running. Partly because later generation tends to pick up technology stuff faster but more importantly, I think the environments such as school and family are contributing a lot into their intellectual and cognitive development. Their parents mostly are engineers, lawyers and business people, no wonder how well they have been trained. While comparing to kids in Vietnam — my home country, I am sad that there is no such awesome opportunity and environment for them. When I was in middle schools, I perceived that I am supposed to do whatever teachers tell me to do without questioning back or challenging whether it makes sense, without being able to understand how this stuff is applied in real life. That’s such a pity. Kids in Silicon Valley are exposed to technology at early age, are brought to top-notch after school programs run by engineers to learn coding and robotics, math, creative reading and writing, to be empowered to do whatever they imagine. Therefore, even at early age, they already know how to solve a problem or develop an algorithm that a college student somewhere else is practicing for a technical interview. Not to mention, best educational tools are all available here for them. They are seriously not lack of any support, only their self-motivation left to work on. How can America not become greater with this very invested talent pool? People who invent stuff all move to Silicon Valley because of the dynamics and the talent pool here. Kids here are taught well and empowered to be great leaders and inventors for future. Then they will grow up and build greater things or work at great and big companies here. Silicon Valley hub alone is running the whole world! Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tesla whose products people around the world are using are all here. Talents from other states or out of states therefore will have to try very hard and sacrifice big things in their lives to be able to stand here for better future. It just brought me a deep thought that the world has not been flatten yet and that how many years will it take for my home country to grow as this pace?
