Learning programming in kindergarten - are Chinese parents crazy?

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Wu Pei started teaching her 6-year-old son to learn programming this year. She thinks it is better for children to learn a skill that may help their future career planning in this increasingly digital world. Now, she has opened an extracurricular class in Nanjing, helping more than 100 parents teach their children programming.

The 35-year-old former programmer at Foxconn's technology division has tapped into a growing market as parents prepare their children to learn programming from preschool, as Oxford University researchers predict that half of all jobs in some countries will be taken over by robots and computers.

Such classes are now available all over China. Ronald in Beijing has taught 150 primary school students to use Scratch, a children's programming software jointly developed by the MIT Media Lab and the Arduino platform, which can be used to do some simple human-computer interaction. In Hong Kong, 2,500 students have participated in Michelle Sun's extracurricular class, the First Code Academy. Wang Jiulin from Xi'an said, "The importance of teaching the next generation to program needs to be elevated to the level of national strategy. Now, most programmers in China can only complete very basic tasks, and the demand for top programmers is still huge." He is the founder of Kidscode.cn, a website that mainly shares some free information and courses.

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The picture shows children programming on laptops in a computer extracurricular class in Hong Kong.

Teacher Wu thought for weeks about how to introduce the basics of programming to the preschoolers. They had just started learning Chinese and math, so how could they understand?

She tried showing them a 3*3 unit grid on the blackboard first, and then invited them to play a game, asking everyone to identify the position with simple up, down, left and right. Then she switched to a digital system and asked the children to accurately locate using the coordinate system. After the children were familiar with the concepts of the x-axis and y-axis, she taught them to play simple games about airplanes on Scratch. Once they were addicted, she encouraged them to learn to make simple games themselves. "Usually, you have to use a game to attract their attention and then introduce new knowledge," said Teacher Wu. Nanjing mother Zhang Minyan watched a video about an American child who wrote a forum APP for friends to discuss their views on Justin Bieber. After that, she decided to let her five-year-old daughter learn programming with Teacher Wu-before that, Zhang's mother didn't think her child had to learn this.

"That was very shocking to me," recalled 32-year-old Zhang's mother. "Since my child was also playing games on the iPad every day, why not guide her and let her learn something in the process?" Since children abroad were learning programming, Zhang's mother felt that her daughter could not fall behind.

Encouraging children to learn to write computer programs can improve the country's technology-driven chain and invent more software and digital tools, rather than a large number of manufacturing and raw material suppliers. As the world's second largest economy, China lags behind at least 16 European and American countries in setting programming class hours.

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Teacher Wu said, "Chinese schools have information technology classes, and some also teach programming, but these classes are not as important as other subjects that determine students' grades. They don't realize how important programming education will be in the future." Last December, Obama wrote a line of code at the launch ceremony of Computer Science Education Week, becoming the first president who can program. He believes that children should learn programming. In July this year, he also said, "No one is born with the ability to program. Children should start learning from an early age so that it can be deeply rooted in their bones."

In 2012, there were 1.02 million software development jobs in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this number will increase by 22% by 2022, driven by "tremendous growth in demand for computer software."

It is entirely possible for your child to create a million-dollar app at age 12 — and it doesn’t require a master’s degree, said Wayne Xiong, who works for Huachuang Capital, a venture capital firm in Beijing that manages 500 million yuan in assets. He also said that developing an education system requires at least 21 years to measure the rate of return, and such an investment is too risky to justify.

Not everyone thinks that knowing how to program will ensure their children's future livelihood. Automation is likely to make machines take over most programming tasks in the next decade, said Tom Davenport, a professor of information management at Babson College in Massachusetts. At the World Economic Forum in September, it was suggested that it is risky to predict which profession will be more marketable in the future. 90% of jobs in 2012 did not exist in 2003. Teacher Wu said that she did not expect programming to make her children successful, but only regarded it as "a tool to show themselves", and it is also a digital tool that people all over the world may need in the next decade.

Teacher Wu said, "Many jobs of my parents' generation no longer exist, and I am also thinking about what these 20 years will mean. When our children grow up, they will compete with the whole world, and by then, programming will be as common as English."

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Teacher Wu is pleased that his son's logical reasoning ability has been greatly improved through programming.

Her son Feng Yiran spends 10 minutes after class to make the games he wants to play. "I really think this is very interesting. My mother asked me to learn it at first, but now I want to learn it myself." Feng recently made a game of fighting dinosaur knights.