CHINESE CHILDREN KICK OFF LEARNING WITH COMPUTER CODING

BEIJING—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 eastern 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 technology books, started to teach his son how to write codes when he was 5 years old.

“I learned coding when was young, so I always believed that Vita learning coding at this age was something normal,” he says.

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,” says Zhou, and the idea for online classes was born.