SHANGHAI, Dec. 18 (Xinhua) -- Wearing a pair of glasses on his chubby face, Vita is a bouncy and active child that can hardly stay seated for more than three minutes at a time. But whenever he talks about programming, algorithms and loops, he becomes totally absorbed.
On Bilibili.com, a popular video-sharing platform in China, the 8-year old vlogger has over 60,000 followers, some are even professional software engineers. The 10 videos in his "Primary school student teaches you to program" series have been viewed millions of times.
"He may have inherited some of my passion for programming," said Zhou Ziheng, Vita's father.
Now a freelancer and stay-at-home dad, Zhou majored in liberal arts, but has been interested in coding and mathematics since childhood.
"In the 1990s, my cousin bought a computer and started to learn programming. I found it interesting and started to follow along," Zhou said. Although he did not become a software engineer, his enthusiasm for coding continues.
At age 5, Vita tried Swift Playground, an app that teaches coding, with the help of Zhou. "He was too young to program by himself," said Zhou.
This summer, after a year of primary school study, the boy suddenly bloomed. He dusted off Swift Playground again and coded a simple game on his own.
With the prevalence of short videos in China, Zhou got the idea of shooting videos of Vita teaching coding.
"I hope recording a video can help Vita consolidate the knowledge he has learned and improve further," said Zhou.
Vita's first video was posted four months ago. Now he has posted 10 videos, with the most popular one being viewed over 500,000 times.
When the boy gets stuck, they pause the recording until they find a solution.
Under Vita's first video, a comment by a user named Luffy said his little nephew is also interested in programming and began learning the tricks of the trade. "When I was this age, at best I would have been learning mental arithmetic. It is a good thing that children now have more choices," said Luffy.
Last Saturday, Vita and his father provided a coding lesson for children of the same age in an Apple store in Shanghai.
Lyv Cheng, 10, demonstrated a game he personally designed. He added several new characters, including a panda, a tiger and a tyrannosaurus to the traditional rock-paper-scissors game, winning a big round of applause.
"I love writing code because I can make a product by myself, and the process is like a game," said Lyv, who just began to learn programming this month.
Programming is no longer a distant abstract concept for many Chinese, but a popular hobby, or a tool to make life better.
During the past Computer Science Education Week, eight blue-collar workers from Jabil's Wuxi plant came to Apple's Design and Development Accelerator in Shanghai to consult about app development.
They come from various positions of manufacturing, human resources and finance and half of them had no professional background. Together, they developed an app for dormitory management.
Two years ago, Apple began sharing Swift coding technology with its supply chain workers. He Jiazhong, a worker from Jabil, finally had the chance to realize his dream of becoming a programmer.
"Many beds were left vacant in our dormitory, and it was complicated to deal with the utility bills. So we came up with the idea of developing an app," said He.
Now workers can simply use the app to check their utility bills and report broken facilities. It also helped raise the dormitory utilization rate by 10 percentage points and saved 30 percent of the manpower during the trial period. He said they hope the app can cover more than 10,000 employees in their factory and be expanded to Jabil's factories in Chengdu, Shenzhen and other places.
In July 2017, the State Council of China issued a development plan for the new generation of AI, pledging to gradually promote programming education.
According to a report published by Analysys, an internet data analysis service provider, the transaction scale of the children's programming market reached 7.45 billion yuan (about 1.06 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017 and the figure is expected to exceed 37 billion yuan in 2020.
While some people expressed concerns over the "overheated and irrational passion" for programming of some individuals, Liang Yitao, who gives free lectures on programming at the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, has a different perspective.
"We have entered the era of AI. Only by equipping our children with the knowledge of artificial intelligence can they better adapt to this new era," Liang said.
"But still, we should respect their interests and avoid cramming," said Zhou.
Last month, Vita became the youngest individual to enter the final of an algorithm competition for teenagers in Shanghai. Zhou said he will fully support his son in programming but "whether he will choose it as his career is up to him."
