Kids take to coding at an early age in China, making it a child's play

The craze of learning to code at an early age has gripped China, making Coding a child’s play in the Asian technology giant. This trend is fueled by parents’ belief that coding skills will be beneficial as well as essential given the Chinese government’s technological drive. Parents who themselves lack coding skills send their children to coding agencies. 

Coding agencies

The coding agencies are booming in China due to the demand from China’s middle-class families who are looking for the best skills for their children. Pan Gongbo, general manager of Beijing-based Tongcheng Tongmei, a coding education centre said that China’s programming education in public school starts very late as compared to developed countries, so after-school tutorial agency makes up for this shortage. The youngest child in his agency is only 3-years-old. 

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An 8-year-old Chinese boy Vita has set up 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.  His father, Zhou who is a freelance translator of scientific and technical books, started to teach his son how to write codes when he was only 5-years-old. When Vita was 4, they started off by playing some coding-related games together. After seeing that Vita played these games very well, Zhou decided to help him work on some real code. Another boy, Ji Yingzhe,10, has been studying the coding language Python for about six months at a coding agency. But before that, he took a semester-long course on fundamental robot building, which he felt was too simple.

The Chinese government has been making huge investments in robotics and artificial intelligence. The government issued a plan in 2017 for AI development that suggested programming courses be taught in both primary and secondary schools. China published its first AI textbook last year and the Eastern Zhejiang province has listed programming as one subject for its college entrance examination. The value of China’s programming education market for children was 7.5 billion yuan (over $1 billion) in 2017 but is set to exceed to 37.7 billion yuan by 2020, according to Analysys, a Chinese internet analysis firm.

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