Programming education causes concern over student pressure

Teaching programming skills to children is becoming a new trend in China, promising higher potential for the country's future artificial intelligence (AI) development but also causing concern over the rise of the pressure on students.

Pupils learn robot programming in Yi'an District of Tongling, east China's Anhui Province, July 19, 2018. [Photo/Xinhua]

China's plan for AI development, issued by the State Council last August, called for the introduction of programming courses in primary and secondary schools, encouraging non-governmental participation in developing and promoting software and computer games for programming education.

As the country attaches greater importance to the computer literacy of its next generations, more and more companies are emerging to fill this niche.

Statistics show that more than 200 start-ups aiming to help children learn coding skills have started in China, with approximately 1.3 billion yuan (about US$193.3 million) of investment flowing into this field during the first eight months of this year.

Meanwhile, many Chinese parents are increasingly convinced that just like Hanyu (Chinese characters), Pinyin (Romanized Chinese), and English, coding is a new basic skill that every child should acquire.

Apart from policy incentives, a more important factor leading to the "programming education fever" may be the hidden relationship between performance in programming competitions and school enrollment.

As some non-publicly funded schools have listed programming competition results as standards for enrolling students, Chinese parents feel greater urgency to send their children to after-school classes so they will have better enrollment odds.

This has aroused concern that programming might turn into another source of pressure on students instead of a brain development activity.

A document issued in September by the Ministry of Education said the papers, certificates and medals in national contests should be printed with the approval number from the ministry and "not for student admission at primary and middle schools."

According to Zhang Hualiang from Zhejiang Provincial Education Department, there is not yet a clear-cut answer to the question whether programming competitions fall into the category of those strictly regulated contests.

The Ministry of Education is making a list of contests allowed to be organized among primary and secondary students, which is expected to offer a solution to the growing concern.