Taiwan

Hsinchu is the heart of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, the city where TSMC, ITRI, and a generation of the world’s most consequential chip companies sit within a few square kilometers of each other. Drive twenty minutes outside the city, though, and the proximity stops mattering. Rural middle schools in Hsinchu County serve students whose families have lived in the area for generations and whose schools have very limited access to the AI, CS, and entrepreneurship curriculum that the city itself helps invent.

The Foundation’s Taiwan work is volunteer teaching at two of these middle schools, organized in partnership with ITRI. The sessions are designed around what the students can actually use, accessible AI concepts, entrepreneurship thinking, and the kind of exposure to the technology economy that the rest of Hsinchu takes for granted.

The original Hsinchu trip happened during Lijie and Chuck’s honeymoon. They had wanted to visit the schools anyway; planning the trip meant fitting one around the other. The Foundation has come back since.

What this looks like in practice

• Volunteer classroom sessions at two rural Hsinchu middle schools
• AI and entrepreneurship curriculum tailored for middle-school audiences
• Partnership with ITRI on logistics, scheduling, and school connections

Why it matters

The students who grow up an hour outside one of the most consequential technology ecosystems in the world deserve to feel like that ecosystem belongs to them too. The Foundation’s job here is to make that feeling concrete, one classroom visit at a time.

What the students wrote

After one of the classroom visits, the students sent us home with a stack of handmade thank-you cards — written in a mix of Mandarin and English and decorated with robots, witches, and ghosts. They are the clearest measure of the visit we have.