Wearing a pair of glasses on his chubby face, Vita is a bouncy and active child that can hardly stay seated for more than three minutes at a time. But whenever he talks about programming, algorithms and loops, he becomes totally absorbed. On Bilibili.com, a popular video-sharing platform in China, the 8-year-old vlogger has over 60,000 followers — some are even professional software engineers. The 10 videos in his “Primary School Student Teaches You to Program” series have been viewed millions of times. “He may have inherited some of my passion for programming,” said Zhou Ziheng, Vita’s father. Now a freelancer and stay-at-home dad, Zhou majored in liberal arts but has been interested in coding and mathematics since childhood. Although he did not become a software engineer, his enthusiasm for coding has endured into fatherhood. When Vita was 4, they started off by playing some coding-related games together, which use icons in place of lines of code. After seeing that Vita excelled at these games, Zhou decided to help him do some real coding. At age 5, Vita tried Swift Playground, an app that teaches coding, with the help of Zhou. This summer, Vita surprised his father by successfully rewriting the code in an app that wasn’t working in an updated system by himself. “I suggested to him to record how he rewrote these codes,” said Zhou, and the idea for online classes was born. “I hope recording a video can help Vita consolidate the knowledge he has learned and improve further,” said Zhou. Vita’s first video was posted four months ago. He has now posted 10 videos, with the most popular one being viewed over 500,000 times. When the boy gets stuck, they pause the recording until they find a solution. Under Vita’s first video, a comment by a user named Luffy said his little nephew is also interested in programming and has begun learning the tricks of the trade. “When I was this age, at best I would have been learning mental arithmetic. It is a good thing that children now have more choice,” said Luffy. In November, Vita competed in a coding competition for primary students held by the Shanghai Computer Industry Association. He spent two months learning the coding language C++ for the competition with the help of his father, going all the way to the finals despite being among the youngest participants. On December 14, Vita and his father provided a coding lesson for children of the same age in an Apple store in Shanghai. In terms of what the future holds, Zhou said it will depend on Vita’s interests and abilities — but he wants to keep his son down-to-earth. “I told him: ‘You haven’t done anything remarkable,’” said Zhou. “This is just one step of (his) coding learning.” Vita says he is happy just to have fans and followers. “Coding is a long-term challenge,” he said. “(But) download the app and you can start learning now.” (SD-Agencies) | 