YINCHUAN, July 22 (Xinhua) -- For much of the world, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, a landlocked area in China's arid northwest, conjures images of sweeping deserts, succulent goji berries and tender lamb. Increasingly, it is also known as a green energy powerhouse, with vast solar and wind farms sprawling across its Gobi desert.
But ask the students at Kangle Yanbao School in the city of Zhongwei in Ningxia, and they will tell you something else entirely. For them, Ningxia is where they built an AI-powered catapult, programmed ultrasonic sensors, and won first prize in a regional robotics challenge.
This is not a scene from a privileged Beijing magnet school. It is the new reality of rural science education in one of the country's relatively underdeveloped regions.
On July 11 and 12, an innovation competition under the Tech Little Classroom initiative, sponsored by China's tech giant Huawei, was held at Ningxia University in Yinchuan, alongside a seminar on rural science education. The event brought together teachers, students and education experts from multiple provinces, including Gansu, Hebei, Yunnan, Hubei and Henan, to showcase practical outcomes and chart the future of rural science education and "AI Plus Education."
Ningxia is better known as China's national demonstration zone for "Internet Plus Education," a designation that might surprise outsiders who still picture this region through the lens of its desert landscapes. It is a testing ground for a significant experiment in China to deliver cutting-edge tech education to rural students who, just a few years ago, had never touched a sensor or written a line of code.
At the heart of the competition was a seemingly simple task: designing a smart vehicle capable of retrieving a sandbag, parking precisely and then tossing a payload to a target zone. Nearly 30 teams from five provincial regions took part. It was a task the students of Kangle Yanbao School excelled at.
"We installed an ultrasonic sensor to report the object's distance in real time. The main control board then calculates the optimal angle and force," said 12-year-old Zhou Zhibo, the team's programmer. "We also added a light sensor. When it turns green, we know the object is in the perfect position and I tell the operator to throw."
The team went further with temperature sensors, cooling fans, voice controls and a sandbag recovery system. The result was not a toy, but a smart catapult created via integrated engineering.
"Rural children never lack talent, but they lack opportunities to show it," said Zhou Jianguo from Huawei, which launched the tech education initiative in 2021. "This event proves what happens when schools, enterprises and local governments work together," Zhou noted.
The initiative is part of a broader national push. For decades, China's urban-rural education gap, particularly in science and technology, has been one of the country's most stubborn inequalities. The central government has made "education digitalization" a national priority to ensure rural students are not left behind in a world increasingly shaped by AI, robotics and quantum technology.
"AI education at the primary and secondary levels is not about turning every student into an AI expert. It is about enabling students to understand and think in ways that align with the demands of a smart society," said Li Feng from East China Normal University.
The Tech Little Classroom initiative has partnered with local education departments and universities to translate advanced technologies like AI into age-appropriate, project-based curricula. Elementary students explore smart agriculture and sorting robots, while middle schoolers tackle smart homes, farms and even digital twin worlds.
By June this year, the program had reached over 100 rural schools across Ningxia, Jiangxi, Hebei, Gansu, Yunnan, Hubei and Henan, involving more than 15,000 students.
Zhang Ling, a professor at Ningxia University and a national expert on science education standards, who piloted the project in Ningxia, noted that her team's data revealed significant gains in rural students' creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, with creativity and problem-solving showing the largest improvements.
In 2025, the team assessed computational thinking and digital literacy, finding that the experimental group outperformed the control group across all dimensions. "As long as we pay attention, change happens and it's transformative," Zhang said.
Notably, the transformation extends beyond students. One of the biggest bottlenecks in rural science education has been a lack of qualified teachers.
According to Professor Zheng Yonghe from Beijing Normal University, full-time information technology teachers account for less than 10 percent of all teachers nationwide, and the gap is even larger in rural areas. In many rural schools, science and IT classes are taught by language or math teachers.
Tech Little Classroom has made cultivating local full-time technology teachers its core goal, and surveys show a 24.2-percent increase in project-based teaching competence among rural primary school teachers in Ningxia after the program's implementation, according to Zhang Ling.
Cao Yi, a primary school teacher from Xingjing Town in Yinchuan, received an award at the seminar for his teaching innovations. "Through systematic training, I've completed the transformation from being able to give lectures to being able to teach effectively," he said.
For the children of Ningxia, the future now includes sensors, algorithms, and a seat at the table of China's technological ascent. Enditem
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