Preparing for the future

Data from the China Internet Network Information Center show that the country has 802 million netizens, which is nearly 60 percent of the country's total population.

But coding education for pre-college students has remained a lesser-known industry in China. But it has a huge market potential.

A report by iyiou.com, an online service specializing in emerging industries, finds that less than 1 percent of China's children and teenagers have studied coding, while the figure is 44.8 percent in the United States and 9.3 percent in the United Kingdom.

But it's never too early to learn coding.

US tech company Hacker-Rank says in its 2018 Developer Skills Report that one in four developers wrote their first piece of code before they were 16 years old, based on a survey of roughly 39,000 developers.

"For youngsters, coding is not training for their future career but a kind of creation that can expand their knowledge of art and imagination," says Weng Kai, a computer science professor at Zhejiang University.