Nurturing tech wizards of tomorrow

More efforts are needed to enhance the science and technology abilities of Chinese children to help these "digital natives" to boost their competitiveness in the tech world, according to an industry insider.

"Faced with increased uncertainties, only digitization is a definite development trend, as the value of procedural and repetitive knowledge and skills will gradually shrink with improvement on AI technology," said Sun Ying, chief education officer at the Future Education Research Institute at Nasdaq-listed coding firm Tongcheng Tongmei.

Sun made the remarks at a news conference on Thursday, where the company announced that it will invest 100 million yuan ($14.96 million) in selecting and training 10,000 future talents with programming, robotics and other technological talents and digital thinking potential.

Supporting measures includes offering a platform for technological innovation as well as setting up a special mentor system to help children in nurturing such ability over the next three years.

Sun said that nurturing a digital thinking will help today's tech-savvy children to filter, identify, and integrate more information, and open the door to the future digital world.

"To make these children prepare for the digital world, more efforts are needed to nurture their ability on '1 plus X' to boost their overall competitiveness," she added.

According to Sun, "1" stands for digital thinking, programming thinking, and science and technology quality education while "X" refers to any hobby such as art and sports.

The same day, the company also signed an agreement with Huawei Cloud to deepen cooperation in cloud, artificial intelligence, and big data.