

12 year old Dmitri  Gaskin gives a Google Talk on JQuery [YouTube Video]  - plinkplonk
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-978395286272895697

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bluelu
I'm so happy I didn't have a computer when I was 12. When you are young, there
are so much more interesing things than computers to explore!

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pkrumins
What are you talking about? THERE IS NOTHING MORE INTERESTING THAN COMPUTERS
TO EXPLORE!!!

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danw
As a comment on flickr[1] put it:

 _The 12 year old in the front is teaching the 30 yr olds in the room how to
use the programming tool created by the guy in the flannel_

[1] <http://flickr.com/photos/mahalie/2312434677/>

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plinkplonk
Speaker Description (from YouTube)

Dmitri Gaskin drinks code with his cereal for breakfast every morning. He's a
jQuery whiz and a Drupal know-it-all. He contributes patches for both Open
Source projects. In the Drupal world, he maintains many modules, is on the
security team, and is involved in the upcoming Summer of Code as a mentor and
administrator. Dmitri has given many talks on Drupal and jQuery, in such
places as Logitech, Drupalcon and live on a radio show out of L.A. When Dmitri
isn't coding, a very rare occurrence, he is playing and composing contemporary
music. And attending classes in the 6th grade. (He's only 12.)

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morbidkk
I would have been hooked to video games or PC games at that age. Though I have
a excuse I saw computer only when I joined the college. yeh lame excuse :)

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himanshu
Impressive kid. I wish I was that smart when I was 12.

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technoguyrob
Whenever I see a story like this I wish the United States would provide
students a far more flexible and natural learning curriculum. For example, the
"mathematics" course trek in the US school system alone is one of the most
dreadful:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=130499>

The problem lies in several issues. As one of "those kids" that started
college at 11, one issue I have recognized to be by far the strongest is the
self-perpetuation of incompetence: high school teachers are usually direly
incapable of providing students with the actual modern perspective on the
subject they are teaching! Qualification wise, I could have been teaching high
school classes three years ago, and I knew a lot of education majors back in
my undergraduate days. Usually, it's the people that aren't smart enough to
pursue the subject that they simply make do with teaching it instead. Most of
the brighter math and physics majors I knew went on to graduate school or a
scientific profession; the others usually minored in education. Perhaps it is
an unfair generalization, but it does seem to be true from my experiences. Of
course, you can all draw the implications that would have on the K-12
education system. To illustrate with a final example, some of the math major /
education minor people told me "I hate proofs"! I thought I would cry.

I didn't mean to make this my life's story, but in any case, perhaps it could
be argued the current quagmire that is our method of ensuring child
"development" is in some way good, simply due to its inherent selectivity.
Perhaps the innovative and intelligent and resourceful will escape the K-12
system much like Dmitri did. It's largely luck, though, as it heavily depends
on their environment (parents, town, etc.). I considered undergrad to be like
my high school. Although I skipped the latter, undergrad was fairly similar in
structure (homework, participation, tests, etc.), except that the classes were
taught by people who actually knew what they were talking about.

On a final note, what Dmitri or I or the 12-year-old Asian kids (sorry for the
stereotype) "do" is not being "super intelligent." It's merely being lucky or
fortuitous enough to see the light in a (imho) broken system. Really, when you
think of it, nearly everything in an undergraduate curriculum is quite simple
if you just read the damn textbooks and do your homework, and in the case of
people like Dmitri, be a hacker and play around. In a perfect education
schema, every kid would be like that. Every kid would be creative; not
shackled and restrained.

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ucdaz
I've got chance to meet Dmitri at the Drupal meetings in the bay area. He's a
good and smart kid.

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keating
Railbait.

