Chapter 4 — Wind Village Robot Team

"Whoever finishes first within twenty minutes, I'll give you extra points." Khanh Dan wrote the problem on the corner of the board, her words shaking slightly because the chalk was short: "Write a program to calculate the sum of even numbers from 1 to 100, print the results on the screen."

Class 9B - the class she just accepted to teach two more classes per week from this week, after the principal merged some empty classes - silently bent over the six working machines, sharing each machine among six or seven students sitting around waiting for their turn to type. Most of them are still struggling with the FOR loop syntax. Some people repeatedly mistype semicolons, causing the compiler to report a red error.

Khanh Dan walked between tables, stopping to look at each group. Coming to the last table near the window, she saw something strange: a little girl sitting alone, not waiting for the machine, writing directly in her notebook with a ballpoint pen, a complete piece of code, no crossing out, no hesitation.

```

program TongChan;

var i, total: integer;

begin. begin

total := 0;

for i := 1 to 100 do

if i mod 2 = 0 then

tong := tong + i;

writeln('Tong = ', tong);

end.

```

"Are you done writing?" Khanh Dan asked, a bit surprised. This is just the first lesson in the class about loops, most students are still struggling with the concept of variables.

The girl looked up. Vu Gia Han, she remembered her name thanks to looking at the class list the day before - always sat last, rarely spoke, her scores in other subjects were good but not outstanding.

"Yes, but someone else is using the device. I'll write it down first." Gia Han said, her voice was small but not timid like Phong. "I'll type again when the computer is empty and check to see if there are any syntax errors."

"Where did you learn programming to know the mod function and the complete program structure start-end like this?" Khanh Dan picked up the notebook and looked more closely. Not just this one - flipping back a few pages, she saw a whole series of other exercises where Gia Han copied the questions and solved them herself, including a small program simulating a number guessing game, with a check for winning and losing conditions, and a pretty neat while loop.

"I borrowed an old book from the district library, teaching Pascal language." Gia Han replied. "The book was printed a long time ago, the cover is torn but the exercises are still usable. I've done all the exercises in the book, now I'm thinking of new topics for fun."

"For fun?"

"Yes." The girl smiled slightly, for the first time since the beginning of the day. "I like to come up with a problem, then solve it myself, then think about how to write it shorter. I rewrote some articles four times before I found it satisfactory."

Khanh Dan was about to ask more when a boy's voice came from the next table, not loud enough for the whole classroom to hear.

"Learning programming is so tiring, Han, it's a girl."

The speaker was a guy named Khai, sitting at the next table, waiting for his turn to type, so he turned around and said a sentence as if it was an obvious thing that didn't need to be discussed. A few people around chuckled, not maliciously, just a reflexive laugh when hearing a familiar joke.

Gia Han did not respond. She bent down, closed the notebook, and put the pen on the table. There was no obvious angry expression, but there was a very quick closing, like a door closing quietly without making a sound - the expression of someone who has been used to hearing that sentence so many times that he doesn't bother to react anymore.

"Khai." Khanh Dan called, her voice calm but serious enough for the whole class to turn and look. "Have you seen the code I'm holding in my hand?"

Khai was a bit confused and shook his head.

"This is a handwritten program by Gia Han, no need for a computer, no need to look up, correct syntax from the first time, while today's lesson my class only studied for half a period." Khanh Dan said, not loudly, just clearly enough. "I don't care who can write this, boy or girl. I care who can write it. Today it's Han."

The whole class was silent for a while. Khai scratched his head, mumbled "yes, I'm sorry" and then returned to his computer without saying anything else. Khanh Dan handed the notebook back to Gia Han, intending to say another word of encouragement, but looking at the girl's face - still bent down, ears slightly red, hand clutching the pen tightly - she understood that adding words at this point would only make things more awkward. She nodded slightly to Gia Han then went to the back of the classroom to check on other groups.

***

At the end of the lesson, when the whole class rushed out to the yard, Khanh Dan saw Gia Han staying behind to pack up her books slower than everyone else, deliberately letting herself be the last one to leave. She stood waiting at the classroom door.

"Thank you for earlier." Gia Han said as she passed by, looking down. "But you don't need to defend me, I'm used to it."

"Familiar doesn't mean right." Khanh Dan replied. "Who told you that for the first time?"

Gia Han paused. The question clearly touched on something she had never told anyone at this school.

"My 6th grade Literature teacher." The girl said, after a short silence. "At that time, I asked her to lend me the Advanced Computer Science book in the classroom's bookshelf. She told girls why she should read that book, to study Literature to ease her mind. After getting married, no one will ask if she knows how to program."

Khanh Dan felt a wave of anger rising, but she held it back, not letting it spill out into a scolding of the teacher in front of her students - that wouldn't help anything right now. Instead she asked another question.

"So were you able to read that book after that?"

"No." Gia Han shook her head. "But the following year, I borrowed the book Pascal from the district library. During the summer vacation, I followed my father to the district to sell pigs. I hid it in the pocket of my raincoat and brought it back, secretly reading it at night, afraid that my parents would ask me why my daughter was reading such a thick book that was difficult to understand."

"Didn't your parents forbid it?"

"My parents don't understand what I read, so they don't stop me." Gia Han said, and in her voice there was something both funny and bitter. "My parents just want me to study all subjects well and pass the high school exam. No one thinks what this is for."

Khanh Dan looked at the girl standing in front of him - fifteen years old, keeping in her schoolbag a notebook full of self-written programs that no one at home knew how to read, self-taught a programming language from a tattered book secretly borrowed, and still having to listen to sentences like Khai's several times a week without bothering to argue back.

"I'm planning on forming a club, making real robots, not just writing programs on paper." Khanh Dan said. "I need someone who knows how to program microcontrollers — it's much harder than Pascal, but if you learned Pascal yourself from old books, I think you can learn this."

Gia Han looked up and looked straight into her eyes for the first time, no longer bowing and avoiding like at the beginning.

"Can girls participate too?" The girl asked, and there was no irony in that question, just the sincere caution of someone who is so used to having to ask before believing.

"I'm inviting you." Khanh Dan replied. "This team has no room for that question."

Gia Han didn't laugh right away. The girl stood still for a second, then nodded, a short but firm nod, like a switch that had just been turned on after a long time of being deliberately pressed down by someone.

***

That night, Gia Han sat at the corner of the study table next to the pig pen behind the house - the only place in the house that was quiet enough at night, because the main room also turned on the TV for her father to watch the news. She opened the notebook to a new page, where she usually wrote self-thinking exercises, but this time she didn't write the Pascal problem like usual. She wrote a headline, underlining it twice: "Robot team — something to learn."

Below, she listed the things she was still confused about: what was a microcontroller, how was it different from a computer; Is the programming language for microcontrollers similar to Pascal; How was the motor controlled by command? She did not have an answer for any of the lines, only a question, but just being able to write it out clearly made her feel much better than the vague feeling that had plagued her since 6th grade.

Her mother, Ms. Xuyen, passed by carrying a basket of rice bran down to the pig pen and glanced at her daughter writing something under the small study lamp.

"What homework are you working so hard on tonight?" Ms. Xuyen asked, her voice normal, with no intention of probing.

"Yes, I took notes on the extra lesson the new teacher taught." Gia Han replied, not completely lying but also not saying everything. She wasn't ready to explain the "robot team" to her mother, partly because she wasn't sure it would take shape, partly because she wasn't sure how her mother would react — support, or like her 6th grade Literature teacher, just a gentler version of the same question: what's the point of learning that.

Ms. Xuyen nodded, did not ask any more questions, carried the bran basket and continued down to the barn. Gia Han looked at her mother's shadow disappearing behind the corner of the house, then returned to the notebook, writing one last line under the list of questions, not technical questions this time: "If I can really do it, I will tell my mother later, when I have something to show her, not just to tell."

She closed her notebook, turned off the desk lamp, but lay awake for a while longer before falling asleep, her mind still reeling from imaginary commands for a machine she had never seen with her own eyes.