Youth learns to transform future with AI

Instead of simply directing visitors to a store, a shopping mall sign may be able to detect crowds, warn of potential stampedes, recognize pets, and even adjust its lighting as conditions change.

Such vision came from an AI-powered sign designed by Qin Zi'ang and Wang Hansen, two eighth-graders from Jiangsu province. The pair made it to the finals of a national youth artificial intelligence innovation challenge, held in mid-August in Wuzhen, a water town in neighboring Zhejiang province.

Using off-the-shelf sensors and AI hardware, the students are turning a familiar piece of mall infrastructure into something that can respond to its surroundings and help make commercial spaces both safer and smarter.

"What fascinates me about AI is its ability to make the invisible visible," Qin says. "When we first learned to code, we were essentially telling computers what to do, step by step. With AI, we are beginning to teach computers how to learn for themselves."

Wang and Qin were among nearly 8,000 young contestants from across China who took part in the finals, held both online and offline. Roughly 170,000 students signed up for the competition nationwide, according to the organizers.

The figures offer one measure of how quickly AI has made its way into youth competitions in China, as contests proliferate from the national level to local events.

The boom comes amid a broader surge in AI development in China. Developers at companies including DeepSeek, Zhipu AI and Moonshot AI are building increasingly capable and accessible language models, helping bring the technology into a growing range of real-world applications.

Technological aspirations

The enthusiasm did not start with AI. The experience of falling behind in the world's industrialization in the past, as well as the humiliations and upheavals that followed, helped foster a strong emphasis on science and technology in Chinese society.

A popular saying decades ago captured the sentiment: "Master math, physics and chemistry, and you can make your way anywhere in the world." When computers and the internet transformed everyday life in the 1980s, another slogan took hold: "The popularization of computers should start with children."

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were household names in China. More recently, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have joined them, with their careers offering a glimpse of the possibilities that technology can bring.

Over the past decade, programming has increasingly joined mathematics and English in the early-education landscape, alongside sports, art, music and dance — activities that many families see as part of a well-rounded education.

At tutoring centers in shopping malls and neighborhoods across the country, children move from handson building with LEGO kits to basic robotics and visual programming, using platforms such as Scratch to create games and animations. Some parents go a step further, hiring private tutors to teach older children Python.

Wang, who helped develop the smart shopping mall guide system, started with Scratch in second grade, moved to Python in fifth grade and took on C++ in middle school.

China had roughly 100 million students in primary schools, 55 million in junior high and more than 30 million in senior high in 2025, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Together, different layers of training form a well-developed pipeline, running from after-school coding clubs and robotics classes to school-based programs and competitions in programming and robotics.