Kids cracking computer coding
Wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a red T-shirt, an 8-year-old Chinese boy is logged in for an online coding lesson — as the teacher.
Vita has set up a coding tutorial channel on the Chinese video-streaming site Bilibili since August and has so far garnered nearly 60,000 followers and over 1 million views.
He is among a growing number of children in China who are learning coding even before they enter primary school.
The trend has been fueled by parents’ belief that coding skills will be essential for Chinese teenagers given the government’s technological drive.
“Coding’s not that easy but also not that difficult — at least not as difficult as you have imagined,” says Vita, who lives in Shanghai.
The little boy uses his channel to patiently take his students — who are mostly children older than him and young adults — step by step through an Apple-designed coding app called Swift Playgrounds
Explaining as he goes, he sometimes deliberately makes mistakes to help show common errors to avoid.
“When I am teaching, I am learning new things at the same time,” adds Vita.
China has been making huge investments in robotics and artificial intelligence, with the government issuing in 2017 an AI development plan which suggested programming courses be taught in both primary and secondary schools.
China published its first AI textbook last year, while Zhejiang Province listed programming as one subject for its college entrance examination.
For Vita, it was his father Zhou Ziheng, who has been his main support, editing his videos and helping to run the channel.
Zhou, a freelance translator of scientific and technical books, started to teach his son how to write codes when he was 5 years old.
“I learnt coding when I was young, so I always believed that Vita learning coding at this age was something normal,” he said.
Zhou Ziheng (left) helps his son Vita create a game with coding on his laptop at their home in Shanghai.
Summer success
When Vita was 4, they started off by playing some coding-related games together, which used icons to replace codes.
After seeing that Vita played these games very well, Zhou decided to help him work on some real codes.
This summer, Vita surprised his father by successfully rewriting the codes in an app which didn’t work in an updated system by himself.
“I suggested to him to record how he rewrote these codes,” said Zhou, and the idea for online classes was born.
Most comments on Vita’s online videos express amazement that he can write code and even teach others at such a young age.
“I just learnt how to use the computer when I was 8,” wrote one.
Parents who don’t have the skills to help can send their children to coding agencies, which are booming thanks to demand from China’s middle-class families looking for the best skills for their children.
The value of China’s programming education market for children was 7.5 billion yuan (US$1 billion) in 2017 but is set to exceed 37.7 billion yuan by 2020, according to Analysys, a Chinese Internet analysis firm.
“China’s programming education in public school starts very late (compared with developed countries), so our after-school tutorial agency makes up for this shortage,” said Pan Gongbo, general manager of Beijing-based Tongcheng Tongmei, a coding education center. The school’s youngest student is only 3.
Pupils attend a class at a children's computer coding training center in Beijing.
