Find a 5-year-old if you need help using a smartphone or tablet is advice that may soon ring truer than ever, with an increasing number of coding classes now available for children in China.

As the country seeks to integrate artificial intelligence into everyday life, parents are becoming convinced that traditional extracurricular courses, like math and English, won't give their children a competitive edge in the future job market.

Chinese parents, so fond of sending their children to after-school training courses, have a new favorite subject: computer coding.

As parents' interest shifts toward tech-related skills, and with the formal school curriculum giving scant attention to coding, companies are emerging to fill the niche market.

Most children are familiar with computers, tablets and smartphones and play digital games on them, but some have gone further than their peers and can create their own games and animation.

"When you keep jumping, the basketball will never fall," said Du Minxing, a 7-year-old from Beijing.

He was playing a game he designed, Basketball Master, that requires players to jump constantly in front of the computer screen to keep a ball floating.

For one jump, the players get one point. After about three minutes and a score of 144, Du stopped.

Out of breath, the second-grader said, "The game can help me lose some weight."

He designed the game in just an hour at a summer coding camp in Beijing held by coding education platform Codemao. In just three days at the one-week camp, Du had designed four games.

"I think I will be able to design eight games at the end of the camp," he said. "When I perform well, the teacher allows me to take breaks and I use the time to design new games.

"Coding is very interesting, and I want to become a professional coder when I grow up so I can design really complicated and interesting games."

Meng Deyuxuan, from Harbin, Heilongjiang province, is the youngest child at the camp and is known by his classmates for saying "no matter how many times you have failed (in coding), you need to keep trying".

The 6-year-old began to learn coding at a training institution run by his father about a year ago.

Meng designed a piano game where players can compose tunes by typing one to seven on the keyboard, with each number representing a different note.

"I never feel tired when I am coding, and I feel great pride when I solve all the bugs and successfully design a new game," he said.

As in most countries, Chinese students do not tend to learn coding unless they are studying a technology-related degree at university. But in a nation locked in an ever-closer embrace with AI, parents are recognizing coding is one of the best ways to prepare children for a future that cannot be easily predicted, and that there's no better time to get their children hooked on coding classes.

Financial benefit

Liu Yue, the mother of an 11-year-old in Beijing, said: "I think learning how to code is more important than English for my son. I prefer these coding courses because they have given my son a chance to solve problems with his own logic."

Her son has been taking coding classes twice a week with Mobby, a subsidiary of TAL Education Group, for two years. Each class lasts two hours, but they can run to as long as three hours if there are problems with the applications her son is designing.

Liu spends around 20,000 yuan ($2,925) a year on the classes and said it is money well spent.

"I have never seen him so interested in any class, and he even codes a simple program to solve math problems," she said.

Han Cheng, whose 10-year-old son also takes coding classes at Mobby in Beijing, said high-paying jobs will require some computer programming skills in the future, so learning how to code has a financial benefit.

Coding will be a basic and essential tool in the future, Han said, and learning coding can help his son develop coordination, logic, communication and social skills.

Since 2015, the Chinese government has been issuing guidelines to encourage schools to experiment with science, technology, engineering and math education－known by the acronym STEM－including coding.

The State Council released a guideline last year requiring schools to incorporate coding into computer courses. It also encourages the development of interesting learning tools for coding education.

From this year, Zhejiang province is listing information technology as an optional subject on the national college entrance examination, and programming is an important part. In Beijing and Shanghai, students' programming talent may improve their chances of getting into better high schools.

An AI development plan issued by the State Council in March includes the setting up and promotion of coding education, and encourages institutes and companies to design teaching software and related games.

According to a report released by Tsinghua University in July, China had an AI talent pool of 18,232 people by the end of last year, accounting for 8.9 percent of the world's total and well behind the 13.9 percent share held by the United States.

The report also said China has a shortage of high-level AI talent－those who produce high-quality research－with just a fifth of the number in the US.

But in terms of AI research, China ranks first in the quantity and citation of research papers, and holds the most AI patents, edging out the US and Japan, the report said.

The investment of Chinese startups in STEM education jumped 15-fold from 2014 to 2017, according to a report by Deloitte, with more private-education providers eyeing the market.

Teacher shortage

Shenzhen-based Codemao is taking advantage of parents' enthusiasm for coding by providing online graphical programming courses for students ages 6 to 16. It also provides an online platform where children can write programs for games and animation and display their creations.

It starts with teaching kindergarten or primary school students the basic ideas of coding through game-playing experience, with guidance from cartoon characters and graphic instructional tools shaped like blocks. Then it gradually grows into algorithms, data structure and programming languages.

Li Tianchi, the co-founder and CEO of Codemao, said he and his partner started the company in 2015 when they noticed that some countries had already added coding as a subject in their schools.

Coding is becoming a basic subject for students and has already been put into primary curricula in the US and some European countries, Li said.

"Children have a lot of creativity, and programming is a useful path to creation, helping them turn their ideas into reality," he said.

Codemao has around 2 million users, and its products are available on both smartphones and computers, Li said.

In the past, computer lessons focused on basic skills and knowledge such as document processing and learning to use existing software, such as Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer, he said.

"It was about how to work a computer, not how a computer works and how to make it work for us," Li said, adding that Codemao aimed to make coding as simple and interesting for children as building with toy blocks.

He said the main difficulty in promoting coding education is that only a few teachers understand both coding and education.

"It's not a problem only in China, but worldwide, as outstanding computer professionals are sought by companies with high salaries," Li said. "Schools cannot offer such high pay."

Li Huiyu, head of the coding department at Mobby, said more parents are realizing that coding is as important today as English was in the past three decades while students think of coding as an interest rather than another cram subject.

The world will need more new coding talent as computers and AI replace humans to some extent, he said, adding that the efficiency of AI had already been proved and the technology is influencing lots of areas.

Coding students are also learning logical thinking and how to apply their knowledge to physics, archaeology, aerospace and other subjects, Li Huiyu said.

"They are no longer addicted to online games, but are learners, thinkers and creators," he said. "Learning to code isn't about becoming a programmer－it's the key to the future."

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