Vietnamese Orphanages and Smartphone Apps

Kids in orphanages have a hard life. You only have to read Oliver Twist to get some idea of that. Or watch the recent hit Netflix drama Queen's Gambit. The best way to secure a future is to get to university. It sure beats becoming a pickpocket, and is a lot more likely than becoming the world chess champion. It turns out that there are an estimated 2 million orphans in Vietnam, kids whose parents are unable to take care of them for one reason or another.

For the last several years Cadence Cares has run a program with Team4Tech where Cadence employees volunteer time to support girls and boys in those Vietnamese orphanages. In 2019, the Cadence team actually visited one orphanage and met most of the kids face to face. That was the plan last year, too, but obviously, that did not happen and the whole program was virtual. This year, the employees were grouped into twos and threes, and each group worked with a particular orphanage and around four to six girls (mainly) in that orphanage to develop a mobile app.

I was one of the volunteers selected this year. As it happens, for the last couple of years I have also been a mentor on an internal program that Cadence runs. Two years ago, I was a mentor to a woman in India. I believe this year it was open to men as well as women, but as it happens I ended up as a mentor to two women, one Indian and one Chinese (although based in the US). I wrote about my 2020 experience in my post International Women's Day and Mentoring Women at Cadence. So I have been a mentor in the last six months to two thirty-something women and a bunch of Vietnamese 12-14 year olds.

The two mentoring experiences, in Vietnam and internally, are very different. I don't know if it is by design or just how it works out, but the internal program is focused on people who are on the cusp of making the transition from being an individual contributor (an engineer, a writer, an application engineer) into managing people for the first time in their life. The program is entirely voluntary so everyone is self-motivated to learn and take advantage of the program. I don't know the criteria for who was picked for the Vietnam program, but many of the other people picked were at that point in their careers (or even earlier). There was a weekly leadership training aspect to the program, too, which was not as interesting to me at this point in my career, although it was fun to work with Cadence employees from all around the world.

For this program, Cadence partnered with three organizations:

• Team4Tech, who partners with companies on social impact projects that provide technology grants and training to build nonprofit capacity and create opportunities for learners around the world.
• Technovation, a global tech education nonprofit that empowers girls and families to become leaders, creators, and problem-solvers.

And the most important, because they were operating on the ground in Vietnam while we were locked down in our living rooms, was Kidspire.

Kidspire Vietnam is a nonprofit organization that provides free, after-school digital literacy and STEM classes to orphanages on evenings and weekends. These classes are designed to complement the students’ public school education, promote digital skills and creative problem solving, and instill self-confidence and hope. The program is designed to help children develop important skills necessary to lead successful lives beyond the orphanage. All projects are centered on computer and web-based learning, and the organization operates exclusively on Chromebooks and Google Apps.

Kidspire Vietnam primarily operates in seven orphanages across Vietnam. The program reaches over 400 students from the ages of 8 to 18. Kidspire Vietnam’s seven lead teachers serve as master trainers for volunteers and are the primary teachers of basic digital literacy, collaborative problem solving, and entrepreneurship in the orphanages.

The two most important individuals for my group, because they were at the orphanages when we were working with the kids, were Ai and Mi (which are pronounced "I" and "me"). The group of kids we had was younger than most of the other groups, and didn't speak English very well. That made interacting directly with them difficult since everything had to be translated into Vietnamese and back. When the kids were discussing ideas among themselves, we were not really part of the discussion so it was a bit frustrating. Or, to put a more positive spin on it, an opportunity to improve my non-verbal communication skills!

One thing we were told is that many of the kids in the orphanages are demoralized and don't see a lot of hope for the future. They want to get out and start earning some money. But without skills in a country like Vietnam, there are few good jobs. In fact, at the age of 18, the kids get sent back to the village they came from, where they may not know anybody, and they are on their own. So the best thing that they can do is to stay in school and get accepted to university. In fact, just about the very best thing that they can do is to get accepted into a STEM program such as computer science at university. There is a worldwide shortage of engineers and so nobody cares who you are or where you came from if you can do the programming or engineering, and you can truly use what you learned in school. That is less true in other subjects like history or psychology, where you are unlikely to end up as a historian or a psychologist.

It turns out that this is even more true in Vietnam than most other countries:

In fact, the returns to tertiary education in Vietnam are significantly higher than the regional average and among the highest in the world. Also, social returns have risen considerably in Vietnam, with the highest social returns being for tertiary education.

I learned to program when I was 14, which was unusual when all computers were mainframes, in special rooms attended to by a priesthood of operators. Time to pay it forward. These kids were not programming on mainframes, obviously, but on ChromeBooks and then running their app on Android phones. We were using a program from MIT called App Inventor. It was a sort of graphical plug-and-play programming environment. In the initial session we had with them, the kids had to decide what app they wanted to create. As in the well-known XKCD comic, one challenge is that it is not obvious to a non-computer-scientist what things are easy for a computer and what things are hard. The kids wanted to take a picture of a test question and then have the app look up the answer. We managed to talk them down to something more reasonable, for learning English, where the questions were pictures of things (and the Vietnamese word) and the user of the app had to come up with the English word. Even to do this well would require a database of pictures and English words. The app ended up being more of a prototype, with a few classes (such as animals, food, emoticons) and half-a-dozen examples of each. I bet you didn't know that the Vietnamese for cat is mèo.

Each team of kids also had to "pitch" their app by making a video in English. With the language challenges, we produced an English script with gaps ("our app is called xxx, it helps people yyy"), Ai and Mi translated that into Vietnamese, and then helped bring it all together.

So let's hope the kids that we gave a taste of computer science and that they can continue and thrive in their STEM careers. Or successfully pitch their startup ideas, get them funded, and have a great exit.

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.