Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

The original title: "Learning programming is as simple as pencil writing?" "

The programming books read by 01-and 3-year-old babies are on the shelves. 1984 is a vigorous year in the history of computer development in the world.

This year, Apple first released the Macintosh computer (MAC), a technology product that is about to change the world; on the other side of the ocean, China put forward the slogan "computer popularity should start with dolls" for the first time.

With the carrier of the wave of personal computers, the sense of social atmosphere on both sides of the ocean has begun to emerge. In Beijing, the Chinese computer Society held the first "National Youth programming Competition", which was signed up by as many as 8000 children.

In New York, a dentist, also inspired by the computer wave, bought himself his first office computer. Later, he bought a computer for each of his four children, one of whom received the gift on his 10th birthday.

The lucky little boy soon discovered his talent for programming. Every afternoon after school, he sits intently in front of the computer to practice programming. To others, it is like the code of a book of heaven, and he can soon master it.

In addition to the surprise, the father hired a computer engineer to "open a small stove" for his son. The little boy has made rapid progress and will soon be able to complete complex programming or even write his own tool software on his own, becoming a famous child prodigy nearby.

Ten years later, he became the founder of Facebook and one of the Silicon Valley idols that often appear in Chinese programming training institutions.

Often in the same frame with Zuckerberg are Musk, the 9-year-old founder of Tesla, Steve Jobs, 10, and Bill Gates, 11. These commercial advertisements are mixed with imperceptible causal fallacies, which seem to imply that learning programming as a child is a shortcut to future business success.

However, for the post-00s and post-10s who were born in the era of rich resources, success is slowly moving away from a single stereotyped definition, and what programming can really lead to is the outward exploration and self-expression of "digital aborigines."

This kind of exploration can only be driven by interest and has nothing to do with utilitarian examination-oriented education. Therefore, in the recent emergence of a number of excellent children's programming works, we can often see romance and sharpness beyond the imagination of adults.

Among the winners of the Fifth National Youth artificial Intelligence Innovation Challenge, there is Li Zimo, a small interstellar fan eager to have a ticket to Mars. He has carefully studied the troubles caused by Martian sandstorms to the Martian international base established by China.

On Mars, dust storms can form dust towers for several weeks, which not only affect the normal operation of solar panels, but also disrupt the passage of the Martian surface, thus affecting Mars exploration.

Using AI technology, Li Zimo and his partners jointly designed and created the Mars fleet model of "Star Chen". Convoys that look like small robots are equipped with cameras, infrared sensors, ultrasonic sensors, photoelectric sensors, steering gear, display screens, touch control screens, real-time positioning and map creation technology. they can receive different types of tasks such as removing sand and gravel roadblocks on the Martian surface and cleaning up the dust of solar panels.

Another middle school student, Zhou Jiekai, used Mini Program to design a Mini Game called Saturn Landing, which clears customs by letting people know about the universe, collecting meteorite debris and cleaning up space junk.

This game contains the ultimate romance of a 12-year-old to the universe. As early as 2019, the NASA Orbital debris Program Office warned that there were more than 23000 pieces of debris larger than 10 centimeters (4 inches), or space junk, within about 1250 miles of the Earth's surface.

While governments are quarrelling about how to clean up space junk, a child can think of solving the space crisis in games and missions. The idea itself has surprised the judges of the competition, programmers who have written code for many years.

Thanks to the rise of the Internet and the popularity of artificial intelligence, teenage programming has become a new wave around the world in the past two years.

In his book parenting in the Digital Future, Sonia Livingstone, a professor at the London School of Economics, invited British parents to think about the important role digital technology plays in their children's lives. He found that joining programming clubs is an important way for many parents to want their children to enter the digital future. Some even see programming as the Latin of the new era.

Domestic programming education is even more "radical". If you search for children's programming on the e-commerce platform, you can find a complete set of "Baby programming", which is suitable for reading at the age of 3 years +, and "programming Enlightenment Books for Children", which is suitable for 5-10 years old.

We don't seem to have to worry that this wave will evolve into a new kind of education volume or chicken baby, only that more and more parents are beginning to realize the importance of programming education.

02. The gravitation of "being seen" Shirley Arnstein, an American scholar, put forward the famous "ladder theory of citizen participation" through the study of the situation of multinational social participation. The theory divides the degree of civil society participation into false participation, superficial participation and deep participation. The survey results show that minors show a strong demand for Internet self-expression and social participation.

If the language is the carrier of thought, then in the digital age, the code is a tool for the post-00 and post-10 generation to have equal dialogue with the real world.

According to the National Internet Information Center, the number of underage Internet users in China exceeded 200 million in 2021, and the Internet penetration rate reached 95 percent, much higher than the Internet penetration rate of adults. For minors, content creation is an important way for them to express themselves and realize their individual value. Data show that at least 27% of minors have produced and published original content on Internet social networking platforms, such as short videos, pictures and texts, emojis and so on.

For minors, content creation is an important way for them to express themselves and realize their individual value. However, in the space of the spread of public opinion, attention is paid to the thinking and preferences of young people, and the phenomena such as "this year's young people fall in love with script killing / Frisbee / motorcycle / Lu Chong" are always in the headlines; the voices of old people and children have become a spiral of silence.

The code world is another set of operating rules. Here, age and location are never a problem, but inspiration, curiosity and creativity are the biggest barriers.

Guo Wei, a 12-year-old teenager in Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, has his own website, official account and three Mini Program styles at an early age. When he graduated from primary school, he developed a classmate book Mini Program for his class, which saved the good memories of primary school in the form of Mini Program to his classmates' Wechat. With this work, Guo Wei was also invited to Guangzhou in 2019 to participate in the first national youth WeChat Mini Programs programming creative camp.

During the closure of Shanghai, a child whose parent was the "leader" passed a "Purchasing small expert-one-button pickup to excel Mini Program", so that the leaders could summarize the data of the group more efficiently.

The young programmer learned C++ a long time ago. His latest goal is to get WeChat Mini Programs online for users to use officially. For these small programmers, having universal application value is perhaps the greatest praise.

This group of teenage programmers can also have a "circle-breaking" effect. For example, bilibili has a very popular pupil UP "Vita Jun" from the age of 8, began to upload programming teaching videos in bilibili, just two months, gained 50,000 followers.

For those videos he sent, some netizens said bluntly: I dare not say how high the level of Vita is, but his explanation is meticulous and clear, adding his own understanding in many places.

There was a voice from the outside who questioned that "Vita Jun" was "encouraged by the seedlings". His father calmly told the media that programming made "Vita Jun" have advanced mathematical and logical thinking, and also cultivated his thinking ability.

This may be because programming not only encourages children's wild imagination, but also gives them the tools to turn their imagination into reality. As the educator Guo Chuyang said, good teaching is to let students pay attention to real life, carry out real research, combined with their own thinking so as to have a real application.

There were previous media reports that Dai Shuwei, a primary school student in Guangdong, used Xiao Shengchu's summer vacation to develop a Mini Program with a small scale at home to help her family monitor her weight when other students were going to make up lessons.

In fact, the process was not smooth. She used visualization software, but there were still some problems that were difficult to solve by herself and needed guidance from her parents, but this did not make her feel frustrated. "when I encounter a problem, I will be like breaking it into modules and arranging them one by one. Solve them one by one. "

As Jobs preached, "I think everyone should learn a programming language." Learning programming teaches you how to think, just like studying law, you don't have to be a lawyer, but the law teaches you a way of thinking. I regard computer science as education, and everyone should spend at least a year learning programming. "

03. Is it possible to type the code as easily as pencil writing? Everyone learns a programming language, which is, of course, the ideal state that Jobs expected.

In the first wave of programming that sprang up in the United States, behind the "prodigy" experiences of Silicon Valley tycoons as teenagers, there are actually more or less hidden "thresholds" that you don't know.

Children's programming training institutions only say that Jobs was exposed to programming at the age of 10, but will not tell you that Jobs' family lived near Silicon Valley, and some of his neighbors were Hewlett-Packard engineers. At the age of 12, he had the opportunity to communicate on the phone with Hewlett-Packard CEO and seek R & D assistance.

The expensive computer owned by Zuckerberg at the age of 10 is also not an affordable gift for the average working class. As for Musk, his father also played an important role in his son's computer enlightenment.

On the other hand, in China, a large proportion of the children who are the first to come into contact with the code are also related to their family background, such as programmers, teachers or technology practitioners. Like the father of "Mr. Vita", he is a full-stack programmer who once participated in the Informatics Olympiad. They have a natural sense of closeness and value identity to programming.

In the process of programming from minority interests to mainstream educational skills, ideas and social soil begin to react. Parents may not expect their children to be the next Bill Gates, the next Zuckerberg, but they all want to provide their children with one more possibility of self-exploration. Especially when many parents realize that the complete isolation of Internet aborigines from electronic products is almost the result of Sisyphus, active learning programming has also become a means of counseling.

Especially after the rise of Mini Program applications, more and more "Little Zuckerberg" have emerged in China. Take WeChat Mini Programs, who has 500 million daily active users as an example, the number of Mini Program users on it has exceeded 3 million, and the proportion of post-00 and post-10 developers is increasing year by year.

"for some children, writing code may be as convenient as writing with a pencil. Jin Yaqiu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a special professor of Fudan University, predicted optimistically at the Global Youth artificial Intelligence Education Summit of "Unbounded Symbiosis with Dreams" held on September 20.

As for how to make more immature or even non-programming children write code by hand, and even play a greater social value, it is inseparable from the joint role of school education, developer ecology and social atmosphere.

Among them, the educators have the most say. At the global youth artificial intelligence education summit, a number of educators in Shanghai broke a lot of "information".

The absence of artificial intelligence education infrastructure affects the popularization and efficiency of programming. Some teachers asked on the spot whether it was possible to precipitate research and development tools, programming courses, teaching videos, and even competition registration portals on one platform to form a modular service. In theory, this module can avoid repeating wheels and allow teachers and students to get what they need, just like the various small module services provided in the current office software.

The shortage of "seed teachers" is also a constraint that artificial intelligence education is difficult to popularize. Educators hope to promote a "double-teacher system" both inside and outside the school. Out-of-school organizations such as the Wechat "Green Miao Project" and the Zhongfu Society Children's Palace can help train more "seed teachers", or provide centralized off-campus training for small programmers.

There are also training teachers who compare the differences in the mode of programming events at home and abroad: when participating in international competitions, the domestic seed selection process is comparable to that of competitive sports-- first, school teachers lead students to gather after class. Through the urban areas selected to participate in the "national team" winter camp, summer camp, and then "pinched", selected to international competitions, "very few students have the opportunity to participate."

On the other hand, foreign countries are basically student-led, and they can sign up if they are interested. All applicants compete in a unified online competition, one level at a time, and the relevant institutions guide them at most once or twice. "this kind of training may not be better than us in the competition," but those kids may go further later because they love it. "

These tiny "pain points" are put together to present a layer of reality, that is, universal programming and artificial intelligence education are still in their infancy. It can be seen that this work has a long way to go.

Surprisingly, people of insight from education, technology, theoretical research and other fields have thought and discussed this quite deeply, and put it into action. Wechat has developed a low-threshold and easy-to-develop Mini Program programming toolkit, which can enable more young people to receive universal education in information technology. Academician Jin Yaqiu and other internationally renowned top scientists are also willing to go into the classroom and have an equal dialogue with young people who are keen on scientific and technological innovation to talk about the future development of artificial intelligence.

Maybe one day in the future, programming will be as simple as pencil writing, and little programmers will no longer be amazing.

"computer popularity starts with dolls" has reverberated in China's scientific and technological circles for 38 years. When human society gradually enters the digital age, this sentence will reap a new echo.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: noise reduction NoNoise (ID:forjingyijing), author: Lola

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.