Abstract: “What is the soul of a computer? Yu asked the little girl sitting at the long table in a child-like voice. The little girl thought about it carefully for a long time, then hesitantly gave yu the answer he expected: “Program.” In July 2018, I audited a children’s programming test class in Haidian University campus of Afa Ying.
“What is the soul of a computer?” Yu asked the little girl sitting at the long table in a child-like voice.
The little girl thought about it carefully for a long time, then hesitantly gave yu the answer he expected: “Program.”
In July 2018, I audited a children’s programming test class in Haidian University campus of Afa Ying. This programming class for children did not make me feel “child’s play” after I graduated from computer science. On the contrary, I felt fresh and thought that if I had taken a programming class like this, I probably would not have changed careers.
Yu Zhuhua, 48, is the founder of ah Fa Ying, a children’s programming training agency, and the main developer of its curriculum. Now the children’s programming training industry is becoming more and more “hot”, in recent years, the domestic children’s programming training institutions have sprung up one after another. When Yu founded the afa Camp in 2010, the industry was still in the “wilderness era”. He saw the whole industry go from nobody to bustling in eight years.
Every entrepreneur has his own reason for starting a business. Yu’s reason is his son. After his son was born, he paid much attention to education and had many thoughts of his own. One of the results of thinking is: meet children “the most exciting point”, parents must not avoid, this is the “grasp” of education children. In 2009, Yu met her son, who was in second grade, “at the most exciting point.” His son was so obsessed with the game that one day he even plucked up the courage to “negotiate” with him and changed the originally agreed half hour game time into one hour every day. At this point, Yu realized it was time for him to act as a father.
Yu is an IT engineer himself, and “playing” with computers is part of his day job. He came up with the idea of offering to teach his son how to play the computer, but “I’m going to make it cool for you.” First he “laughed” at his son, you are here every day beating monsters, how boring. The son asked, “How else can we play? Then Yu started showing off his game to his son. But the “miracle” of the code he wrote in BASIC and C on the screen did not move his son at all. Yu realized there was “a huge barrier” between the charm of programming he knew and kids. Scratch now came into view.
Scratch is a graphical programming language for children developed by MIT in 2007. It differs from the language programmers use in that there is no code to write. Scratch allows kids to write programs like building blocks and create all kinds of fun things. The essence of a program is algorithm and logic. Scratch saves boring tasks such as writing code and debugging syntax errors for children, but retains the essence of programming. The algorithms and logic used are the same as those used by programmers.
This tool was exactly what Yu needed. He taught his son several lessons in Scratch, and his son was really interested. He made an appointment with his son to give him lessons every Saturday morning, and his son’s habit of sleeping in on weekends has changed. He wanted to enroll his son in a systematic study class, but looked around, no. Only like beida jade bird on the market for adult programming training institutions. At this time an idea came out: it is better to open their own classes! He believes there are plenty of parents like him in Beijing who want to steer their children away from the game.
Little more than a month later, Mr. Yu resigned from his executive position at a foreign company. In the spring of 2010, he recruited his first student. Yu Zhouhua, a 40-year-old IT engineer turned teacher Yu, had no shortage of money or experience (he ran a database marketing company with a friend between 2002 and 2007 while working full time). The only thing he had to consider was whether what he was doing was meaningful enough on its own. Some friends threw cold water on him, saying, “If you teach English and math, you can eat well. If you teach programming, you will starve to death.” Yu was not impressed. His intuition told him it was worth doing. He believes that the age of intelligence is inevitable, and that it would be unthinkable to have no concept of programming at all.
“There is an essential factor in this, which is the evolution of our civilization, and I was carried along by this tide. If you don’t think carefully, you won’t be shocked to find that people who play Go can’t play computers, people who drive cars don’t drive, and an abstract code does so much work for us. But if you think carefully, you’ll think we humans are amazing.” In the room where he teaches his children, Yu explained to me what motivated him to get into the field.
His first exposure to computers came after he entered college in 1988. He remembers his “shock” : “I suddenly realized I’d written a few lines of code, and one thing at a time happened.” It was a whole new world for him. Little by little, this new world opened up to him. E-mail, the Internet, artificial intelligence… In his work, he also had a deeper and deeper feeling and understanding of it. In Yu’s view, computers are the “highest manifestation” of human intelligence, and his goal in teaching his son is to impart “this great beauty to the child.” So he was “very excited” when programming for Children appeared, an entrepreneurial project that perfectly matched his values.
Ah Fa camp is more like a family workshop, and Yu is the soul of it. Eight years after starting the business, the team now has only nine people, eight of whom are teaching. He still attends classes for at least 10 hours a week. At first glance, Yu’s class does not sound like a programming class. He talked about brain cells from chips and soul from programs. From time to time, he said some interesting expressions: “The magic of programming is the most amazing magic invented by human beings.” “Computers are like pianos, with 1.9 billion keys.” “A program is a living thing, and it has two states: one is working and one is sleeping.”
At the beginning of his business, yu not only taught the students of Alfa Camp, but also managed to get into Beijing Yucai School, where he taught programming classes for fourth-graders. The trick he used on his son still worked, and he “conquered” the naughtiest kids in his first lesson. Yu came up and showed them a program in Scratch, “and they went in.” He told the children that programming was like God creating the world: God got tired one day and wanted to do something interesting. He said, “Let there be light, there will be light. Programming is like, “I think there should be a Plants vs. Zombies game, and you just make it.” To the class of children carrying bags to the classroom outside the time to remember his words: “Teacher, we will be god!”
What appeals to Yu about teaching kids to code is not just programming, but kids. He loves and even “worships” kids, and when he and a few friends go on family trips together, he must be the one to take care of the kids. He was full of curiosity about young minds. One day, when his son was three or four years old, he was taking a bath and asked sadly, “Dad, what if the solar system were to be destroyed?” In his opinion, adults are vulgar in front of children, who are preoccupied with trivial thoughts, and children are apt to ask philosophical questions about the nature of the world.
For Yu, teaching children is both a way to learn from them and a way to prepare them for the squeeze they will face as they enter the adult world. “Man’s spiritual world is continually squashed by his life. In the kindergarten when you want to save the human, and then to the primary school stage is a little bit smaller, to the middle school said I want the college entrance examination, to the university graduation, Beijing housing prices are so expensive, his wife can not find…… I would say that before reality squishes you, as a teenager (I) made it a little bigger.” “If I get this big, it ends up here. If you hold it this far, it will be compressed.” In his own youth, it was the Classical German philosophy of Kant and Hegel that helped him open up the space, and he now wanted to open up the space for them with programming.
But getting people to understand the value of learning to code for kids is still a challenge. In 2010, Yu collected the phone numbers of principals of almost all key primary schools in Beijing and called them one by one, but all of them refused without hesitation except Yucai School. Yucai school leadership to introduce the time, also almost yellow. Later, the topic of games successfully attracted the moral education director who had been distracted. Moral education director said that his biggest annoyance is that students play games and pass around the secrets of Plants vs. Zombies in class. “I hate it.” Yu seized the opportunity to tell him that we should use programming to occupy the campus culture, “to change the negative computer culture into a positive computer culture,” which impressed the leadership of Yucai.
Realistic reasons are also needed to impress parents. Besides “correcting” children who are addicted to games, a stronger reason is to go to school. Yu summed up three reasons to persuade parents. Many of our children are admitted to The High School attached to Renmin University of China because they are good at programming. The second one is that programming can probably make your child better at math. The third reason is somewhere between utilitarian and unutilitarian: programs have no room for details to be wrong, so computers can teach your child to be detail-oriented and perfectionist — so they don’t always fail to score 100.
Yu understands parents’ “utility” and wants to strike a balance between test-taking and “real education.” “I’m a parent myself, and all parents are caught in the middle. One goal is to want children to succeed, what does success mean, do well in the college entrance examination, do well in the middle school entrance examination. There is also hope for a happy child with interests and genuine intellectual curiosity. These two are sometimes contradictory. For example, if you are writing every day, another important goal is lost. I say your child has brushed enough questions, you have to give him a chance, let him release his creativity, imagination. You know that in the end no one will give you a paper. Who gives Ma Yun papers? You’re facing the world.”
Mr Yu also sees social stratification in his client base. After all, children’s programming is far from being directly linked to admission like Olympic math and English, and the willingness to accept it is generally proportional to the social class of parents. For the first two or three years, most of the children who signed up for the afa camps came from elite families whose education focused on respecting their interests and unleashing their creativity. The first young student he recruited came from a typical family: a father with a PhD in political science from Harvard who had returned to China, and a mother who worked as a vice-minister in a state-owned enterprise. When he gives lectures in Beijing’s suburban counties or third-tier cities, Yu’s arguments often fail to convince parents. Many parents ask directly: can you add extra points at the beginning of a small rise? When they hear the negative, they lose interest. “You’ll find that they are more utilitarian and all they care about is getting into a good college.”
But things are changing outside, too. And the pace of change is faster than Yu expected. He was sure that children’s programming was a future industry, but he did not expect the “future” to come so quickly. Over the past eight years, he has felt that recruiting “went from being extremely difficult to getting easier”. As for the changes in the external environment, a landmark event is the Development Plan for a New Generation of Artificial Intelligence issued by The State Council in July 2017, which clearly states: “Implement the national Intelligence education program, set artificial intelligence-related courses in primary and secondary schools, and gradually promote programming education.” In March 2017, Zhejiang province also began to include information technology (including programming) in the elective subjects of the college entrance exam.
In the last year or two, more and more parents have taken the initiative to come over. In the past, Yu had to explain to them why their children want to learn programming first, but now this part can be directly skipped. They came up and said, we want to learn programming, how is your curriculum designed? The whole environment helps Yu and his peers “educate” parents, who feel the signals of the coming era of ARTIFICIAL intelligence in various reports and online opinions every day. “From 2010 to now, the situation has changed dramatically. If you said there were 100,000 potential customers, now there are tens of millions of potential customers.”
Yu Zhuhua teaches programming to students on campus
After The State Council issued a document, capital has also sought over. For two to three months, Mr. Yu saw an average of two groups of investors a week. He’s not averse to raising money, but he hasn’t met a single “soul mate.” He hopes to make curriculum development a long-term, core work of the camp, but the investors he talks to only care about replication and expansion. Investors often “questioned” him: “Teacher Yu, what is the use of you talking so deeply? Do parents understand? You just want the kids to have fun and you make the money. Quick copy, why talk so deep.”
But that clearly didn’t suit Yu’s original intention, which was never to be a business from the start. For him, the primary motivation was to teach kids to code, and business was simply a means to that end. He doesn’t have the commercial hunger that many entrepreneurs have. He had a desire in that sense, too, but in his youth. He once made $10 million by trading options in less than a month. After experiencing the “sharp thrill of success,” he found it was not what he wanted. It was the “very weak” sense of happiness of “getting a good shot and then emptiness.” He wanted “deep, unbroken” happiness, as Camp Alfa had now brought him.
“This child you teach him, and he grows up like a son. Round after round, great happiness.” For this reason, Yu’s role in the alfa camp has hardly changed. From a handful of students a year to a dozen, dozens, and now seven or eight hundred, his main focus has always been on the course. Management takes up little of his time: “Yell and get the job done.” From conception to PPT, demo presentation and video recording, it takes him a month or more to prepare a class (up to now, he has done exactly 100 classes). “You have to completely sink in and reframe the curriculum with a child’s perspective and understanding, so it’s very slow.” Yu repeatedly stressed to me that one is “a child’s perspective” and the other is “slow.”
He tells them facts that “amaze” them and the rationale behind them. For example, multicolored pictures are represented by zeros and ones on the computer, and behind them are small red, yellow and blue light bulbs on the monitor that adjust the brightness. Yu’s classes are a mix of mathematics, science and philosophy. He uses the program to talk to kids about interesting but profound issues. One of the lessons was “Enlightenment ethics”, which was designed to answer a child’s dilemma in life: should I be a good person or a bad person in real life?
Alpha Camp teacher
Yu first discussed a set of rules with his children. There are three types of people in the game: the good ones (who are always open), the bad ones (who are always trying to take advantage of others) and the ordinary ones (who have a tendency to fight fire with fire). Their encounter results in several events: a good person meets a good person or an ordinary person, a “cooperation” occurs, and the blood of both parties increases by 10%; Bad guys and bad guys or ordinary people meet, there is a “war”, both sides of the “health” decreased by 20%; When good people and bad people meet, there is a “theft”, the “blood” of good people decreases by 30%, and the “blood” of bad people increases by 30%; When ordinary people meet ordinary people, there is a 70% chance of “cooperation” and a 30% chance of “war”. If a person’s health drops to 0, that person disappears from the stage, and if it rises to 200, that person splits into two. After the program is written, run and see the results given by the computer.
This was the scenario Leibniz once imagined: people would gather around a desk on a tough problem, write it out in what he envisioned as “universal writing” — a precursor to modern computer language — and say, “Let’s work it out!” The problem was solved. Of course, The program Yu designed won’t really solve the problem, but he wants to open doors for children. As a result, the good guys disappear, followed by the bad guys (who feed on the good guys), and the steady growth of the average guy — it seems best to be an honest guy.
But how to be an honest ordinary person? Yu then asked the children a question they might have to think about for the rest of their lives.
Starting his own business did not make Yu’s life anxious and stressful. Instead, Yu is now closer than ever to the life he really wants. Before that, whether he was working as a senior executive in a foreign company or starting his own business for the first time, he never thought that he was doing what he was going to do for the rest of his life. But now he is sure that “if I can do this [Alfa Camp] well, I will do it for the rest of my life” and “my life will be complete.” He shared a moment in an article. One day, some students from the affiliated high school of Peking University were having classes in the Alfa camp. “They were doing things very quietly and efficiently there,” he thought at that time. “As long as there were such moments, nothing else mattered.”
Yu zhuhua has a wide range of reading interests. Recently, he has read Foucault’s Words and Things, Hua Luogeng’s Introduction to Higher Mathematics, shuo Wen Jie Zi (Shuo Wen Jie Zi), and has been reading books related to algorithms. Of course, he is now the biggest “interest” or lesson plans. Whenever he meets something interesting, he thinks about how to put it into the course of the Alfa camp. “Can you open a door for the children?” He also writes programs on his phone, sometimes on the go, when he feels like it. For Yu, coding is a bottomless pit (” You know, I’ve been learning it for years, and I feel like an idiot every day “). The same is true of Scratch. Scratch, he said, “won’t be studied for another decade.”
Mr. Yu And partner of ah Fa Camp (second from left)
To his delight, the seeds sown in the classroom have also sprouted one by one. “Some kids might have been playing music for a decade, but he started coding all at once.” Yu zhuhua told me a story about a student. Parents just met with him in May to “share the joy of their son’s success”. The student has just entered the computer science department of New York University. In 2010, the boy was in fifth grade when he signed up for an Alpha camp to create a game. The experience of learning to program changed this normally gifted child. He studied at the Alfa Camp for two years and went to the United States after junior high school, but his interest in programming never dropped. He went on to learn JAVA in the United States and taught Scratch to American children in the community. Math also became very good, and won the Gold medal of the American Mathematical Olympiad.
Yu’s vision is for 100 million children across the country to learn to code. All of camp Alpha’s development revolves around the “starting point” of getting more kids to learn programming. Some members of the team opposed the introduction of franchisees, but Yu decided to do it because he thought it would expose more children outside Beijing to programming. “I said I only have one goal, there’s no 2B, 2C, just two kids, and then do anything.” Therefore, he also attaches great importance to the cooperation with the authorities (” If the education commission of a province moves him one day, he may influence thousands of schools at once, and I value this kind of influence “). After most of the time devoted to curriculum development, the rest of Euhua was devoted to this area. He and his team have been to Beijing Yucai School, China Science and Technology Museum, High School affiliated to Peking University and other schools and institutions to open classes, helped China Association for Science and Technology to do children’s programming education and training for 1200 primary and secondary school teachers in China, and jointly held several children’s programming competitions with China Association for Science and Technology…
Mr Yu now likes to promote a concept he came across in a book years ago: a third language. The so-called third language means that computer language has become the third language after natural language and mathematical language. According to Yu, these three languages correspond to three eras: natural language corresponds to the age of agriculture and handicraft, mathematical language corresponds to the age of industry, and procedural language corresponds to the age of intelligence in which we live. “Replacing human intelligence is the single most important mode of production change of our time, and its language is program.” “Many teachers don’t understand why they teach programming, so they don’t have the confidence to do so,” Yu told me. I tell them that you are teaching a third language and that this language will affect their mental structure for the rest of their lives. Sometimes I may not be programming, but I think about it programmatically. That’s the nature of the language. It’s a model for the world.”
“In another 20 or 30 years, the age of intelligence may have fully arrived. At that time, I think the way of human work has changed a lot. So this matter, do you think it is possible to let so many children in China do not know? We have to do this. The Ministry of Education and regular colleges and universities have also started to do this. But even if we go a little earlier, I am willing to share our experience with all teachers. So as long as I can contribute to the current, I think this life is meaningful.”
Yu told me a touching detail about the current “torrent” of The Times. One day on the road, he saw a three-year-old child telling his mother that he was going to eat McDonald’s. The mother said that she would not go because she had no time today. Then the child scratched his hand in front of his face and said, “It doesn’t matter, just one stroke will do.” The everyday scene left Yu “particularly shocked.” “I was like, this kid is like a god, you know? If you’re in an ancient society and a person says I want to eat, here it comes, what’s the concept? It is this child who has adapted to this existence. How many people did he move with one stroke? That’s when it started, and with one stroke he moved the world.” The driving force between “the stroke” and the world is the procedural magic he teaches his children.
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