This archive report was first published on 10 December 2019.
China's push for technological advancement has led to a surge in coding education among children, with some as young as three years old learning the skills.
According to Analysys, a Chinese internet analysis firm, 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 37.7 billion yuan by 2020.
For many Chinese parents, coding skills are seen as essential for their children's future, with the government's AI development plan in 2017 suggesting programming courses be taught in both primary and secondary schools.
One such child is Vita, an eight-year-old boy from Shanghai who has set up a coding tutorial channel on the Chinese video streaming site Bilibili since August, garnering nearly 60,000 followers and over one million views.
"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.
With the help of his father, Zhou Ziheng, a freelance translator of scientific and technology books, Vita has been learning coding since he was five years old.
"I learnt coding when I was young, so I always believed that Vita learning coding at this age was something normal," said Zhou.
When Vita was four, 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.
For children under six, coding agencies offer special programmes that include activities like Lego building, which also uses coding knowledge and skills.
According to Pan Gongbo, general manager of Beijing-based Tongcheng Tongmei, a coding education centre, children at six or seven are fully capable of learning coding in cognitive development.
"Don't underestimate the learning speed of children. In some of our courses, they learn even faster than our adults," he said.
