Preparing for the future

"Once I had a computer, I used it to program a 'rock-scissors-cloth' game (the Chinese version of rock-paper-scissors)," Ding says in a video statement during the Beijing event where Kada was officially launched on Oct 10.

During the past year of testing, Kada's 13-episode free coding curriculum has been watched more than 100,000 times and has caught the attention of around 7,000 teachers, according to Kada's official statistics.

Aside from watching the videos illustrating how to program using Scratch, Yuan also joined dozens of students in a WeChat group that regularly assigns homework. One of his favorite digital works is titled An Adventure in Space.

A blend of computer game and short animated flick, the work set against a brightly colored backdrop centers on a spaceman, who pilots a red vehicle to Saturn. When the little astronaut wraps up his task on the remote planet and returns to Earth, he is awarded by a yellow duck that Yuan designed as the "head of NASA" in his fantastic tale.

By spending around four hours to polish the work, Yuan seems to demonstrate his mother's idea that learning coding not only improves logical thinking but also benefits imagination.