Coding is child’s play in China, where an 8-year-old is a tutor
- Vita is one of a growing number of children who are learning the skill before they enter primary school as the country invests heavily in robotics and AI
- Parents who don’t know how to code themselves send their kids to agencies, which are booming amid demand from middle-class families
Wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses and a red T-shirt, an eight-year-old Chinese boy is logged in for an online coding lesson – as the teacher.
Vita set up a coding tutorial channel on the Chinese video streaming site Bilibili in August and has so far garnered nearly 60,000 followers and over 1 million views.
The trend has been fuelled 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.