Like a famous teacher

The ensuing summer vacation increased Lin Yuan's tutoring schedule from half a day per week to three half-days per week.

Working 12 hours a week at 200 yuan per hour, he earned 2,400 yuan in seven days.

And it was settled weekly.

There were no assessments either. Or rather, the assessment method became whether the three young masters were happy with their learning.

Lin Yuan also had free rein over the teaching content.

To prevent his teaching from seeming too absurd, he still included some primary school curriculum content. He found the Purple Gold City primary education stage mathematics syllabus and, focusing on the knowledge points within, casually went over them with the three little ones.

Finally, he made sure to instill in them one principle: If you find yourself unable to learn something, first ask yourself if you truly want to learn it. If not, then pass. If you want to learn but still can't, then you must learn to question the textbook in front of you, and the teacher standing before you.

Believe firmly: If you can't learn, it's mostly not your problem, but the teacher's and the textbook's inadequacy.

The three little ones heard such a shocking conclusion for the first time, especially coming from a student of a prestigious school.

Lin Yuan, of course, had some ulterior motives mixed in. There are naturally some idiots in the world who can't learn anything no matter what. But the biggest obstacle on an individual's learning path is always their own self-doubt.

After all, having received a good amount of money from the parents of these three little ones, Lin Yuan still wanted to instill in them the most precious wealth—confidence for two hundred years of life.

Besides formal teaching, Lin Yuan also encouraged them to buy some smart hardware to play around with.

Online smart hardware based on Arduino and Raspberry Pi platforms had long been mature and widely adopted. For primary school students, there was no need to understand the underlying principles; just knowing how to assemble them was enough.

Since the three families were well-off, Lin Yuan had them buy a large pile of smart hardware.

Then he taught them simple graphical programming, and so various small cars and robot dogs never stopped moving around the house all day.

Later, Lin Yuan casually mentioned that things running on the ground were ultimately not as fun as things flying in the sky, so the three little ones pestered him to teach them how to assemble a shuttle.

Although ready-made shuttles were available online, assembling their own allowed them to DIY some accessories, such as installing a soft bullet launcher.

Until one day, the three little ones secretly installed an electrically heated wire on the shuttle, and then replaced the soft bullets in the soft bullet launcher with skyrockets.

Then the cats and dogs in the community suffered.

When explaining physics knowledge, Lin Yuan had demonstrated heated wires to them. He had also brainstormed with them how to adjust the friction of the soft bullets in the soft bullet compartment so that they wouldn't fall out during flight and wouldn't get stuck due to too much friction.

As a result, the three divine beasts applied what they learned flexibly and integrated the knowledge points thoroughly.

From then on, Lin Yuan was no longer allowed to teach them to play with smart hardware. In fact, he didn't dare to teach them anymore.

Boys are born with no resistance to things that exude power; their DNA radiates an inherent restlessness.

After that, Lin Yuan had no choice but to teach them programming.

But since they were still children, he could only teach some simple graphical programming.

To increase enjoyment and boost their learning interest, Lin Yuan taught them programming by making games.

He first taught them to write Tetris, but Tetris clearly wasn't appealing enough.

After that, Lin Yuan switched to teaching them to write a simplified version of Angry Birds.

Fortunately, game programming has many ready-made frameworks available, and simple 2D side-scrolling games don't require too much knowledge, so for Lin Yuan, he could completely learn on the fly and apply it immediately.

However, ultimately, Angry Birds was not created. Instead, what emerged was: Beat the Little Kids.

This was a game Lin Yuan had played in his childhood, so old that he no longer remembered its full scope. It was only during one class, when he was annoyed by the three divine beasts, that Lin Yuan, out of helplessness, joked, "I really want to relive 'Beat the Little Kids.'"

Then he was asked, "What is Beat the Little Kids?" Lin Yuan then roughly described the game from his memory.

He even looked it up on the 4366 mini-game website. Sure enough, such an extremely unharmonious game had long since disappeared.

However, one day, a parent contacted Lin Yuan late at night.

"Teacher Lin, aren't the games you're teaching the children to make a bit inappropriate for minors?"

Lin Yuan was puzzled at the time, "The game with birds and pigs isn't real fighting."

"Teacher Lin, I didn't see any birds."

"[Image]" The parent sent an image.

Lin Yuan then inquired further and only then learned the full story. It turned out that ever since the three divine beasts learned game programming and heard Lin Yuan's casual idea, they would close their doors every night and work together online, painstakingly creating this dark-themed game for teenagers—Beat the Little Kids.

The game had no particular art style; it was purely stick figures drawn with a pencil on paper.

The game content was quite explosive; the limbs of those stick figures could be knocked off. It even supported multiplayer online PK.

The parents only found out after being reminded by the teacher. It turned out that the three divine beasts had also posted their work in the class QQ group to show off.

Fortunately, the parents did not blame Lin Yuan; instead, they affirmed his teaching achievements.

After all, for boys of this age, doing something out of line is not uncommon; good guidance is all that's needed.

—

By the middle of the summer vacation, Lin Yuan had already saved nearly ten thousand yuan. It looked like a year's worth of tuition and living expenses would be covered. If he spent sparingly, he could even send some home.

Lin Yuan greatly enjoyed his minimalist life; he even prided himself on being the most unmotivated minimalist.

One night in late July, Lin Yuan attended one of his students' birthday parties. By virtue of his teacher status, and because of the fame of the "Beat the Little Kids" masterpiece, Lin Yuan earned the reputation of being "flexible in teaching" and was praised as "truly a graduate student from a prestigious university."

Enjoying good food and receiving gifts, Lin Yuan had a very pleasant evening. Many parents came to him, drawn by his reputation, to ask him to teach their children.

Furthermore, due to recent international trade disputes caused by semiconductors and the sudden emergence of ChatGPT this year, Lin Yuan's computer science background in AI became even more sought after.

Coincidentally, Lin Yuan had some understanding of ChatGPT in his free time, and with the slight tipsiness from drinking some wine, he couldn't control his mouth.

"ChatGPT is actually not as powerful as the outside world thinks, and this is determined by its underlying principles. It is essentially still based on the Transformer framework, but it's just brute force..."

These people didn't understand what a Transformer was. After all, the most popular AI courses these days were sold by a cross-disciplinary student from Tsinghua University's Academy of Arts. This indicates that people often care more about packaging and overlook the essence of AI. Of course, the main reason is that people don't understand technology, so they can't see through the essence at all.

Lin Yuan thus gained a layer of mystery, attracting even more onlookers.

Many parents were already handing Lin Yuan business cards, clearly treating him as a future IT mogul.

Most of these people had some money, but not an extreme amount. They were much richer than ordinary people but couldn't break through their own ceiling. They constantly racked their brains trying to seize the next opportunity for wealth explosion but lacked many channels for information.

And with AI being hotly discussed, they naturally became extremely concerned.

These people typically had household assets starting in the tens of millions; in Lin Yuan's view, they were truly the middle class. Earning money from these people was much, much easier than delivering takeout.

On the way back that night, Lin Yuan, as usual, shared a ride to save money. He wasn't so broke now that he had to walk a long way to catch the subway, but he still adhered to the principle of saving wherever possible.

The night outside the car window was dim and yellow. A slightly tipsy Lin Yuan leaned his right hand on the car door, resting his chin on his palm, enjoying everything he saw. He felt as if he was slowly integrating into this place.

Lin Yuan was very engrossed; he didn't even notice the other passenger sharing the ride with him in the next seat.

The car drove on, and there were fewer and fewer pedestrians on the road. Finally, it stopped in a secluded place.

Lin Yuan asked, somewhat puzzled, "Master, why aren't we moving?"

He didn't notice that the person next to him had been very alertly watching him the entire way.