educational resources exists objectively. Our children sit in classrooms with bright and clean windows to read, run freely on the brand new plastic track, and learn programming, dance, music... everything they are interested in in their spare time, and these are even a luxury for children in some areas, especially remote areas. In order to provide these children with a better learning environment and enrich their interests and hobbies, more and more companies have begun to participate in educational public welfare, exporting technology and resources to provide various types of support to the local area.
In September last year, Tencent released the "Double Intelligence and Physical Education" project, which plans to build 100 future sports fields and 100 future classrooms in urban and rural areas across the country. Through the model of hardware, courses, training, and competitions, we will develop children's potential, let them experience the charm of cutting-edge technology, and improve their sports quality in happy sports.
In more than a year, the project has made considerable progress, covering 17 provinces (autonomous regions), building 25 future classrooms and 22 future sports grounds, benefiting 942,600 students.
Wang Zhuo, an information technology teacher from Ruyuan National Experimental Middle School in Shaoguan, Guangdong, talked about the changes brought about by the implementation of the future classroom in the school.
In the past 18 years of his teaching career, Wang Zhuo has spent most of his time teaching students how to operate Word. The computer class once a week has to be canceled during holidays. Taking the initiative to give up classes to the main subject is a kind of "consciousness". He is very aware of the deep-rooted idea of "number-only theory" in rural schools.
But he clearly realizes the huge impact of mobile Internet on rural children, but their real living environment is almost unchanged. There are no exhibition halls and museums here, let alone artificial intelligence competitions. Mobile phones are becoming more and more attractive to them.
Xu Ge is one of them. He has average grades and an introverted personality. He especially likes playing games because games are "the coolest thing he has ever seen." Compared to winning, Xu Ge prefers the character action design and scenes in the game. Whenever he faced accusations from his parents, he would just put down his phone and remain silent without any explanation.
When he participated in the future classroom selection process, Wang Zhuo had no idea what the future classroom would look like. Can it give students like Xu Ge one more possibility? On the day the future classroom was launched, the children shouted out their inner voice, "Wow."
But a new question came again, what lessons should be taught in such a classroom? Wang Zhuo suffered from insomnia. Li Yan and Zheng Ye have been discussing the issue of
within Tencent for more than half a year. Open source hardware, programming, , 3D printing, , and Tencent's characteristic technology courses are all courses that have been explored in schools where the future classroom was launched early. Each course has detailed introductory guidance. For "new" teachers like Wang Zhuo, experienced future classroom teachers are also encouraged to provide one-on-one "old-to-new" assistance.
"I didn't expect that the students in Future Classroom were all so smart. They learned so fast, and often came up with ideas that I hadn't thought of. I then simply guided them to explore on their own. After taking away the teacher's pretensions, their innovation ability became stronger."
Xu Ge is one of Wang Zhuo's students who knows everything. He quickly learned programming and began to make his own works. He designed a smart wardrobe for his sister, and this work won the third prize in the National Primary and Secondary School Information Technology Innovation and Practice Competition (NOC).
Xu Ge's award-winning work "Smart Wardrobe"
After Xu Ge won the award, his attitude towards learning became much more positive. When the teacher asked about his future plans, he no longer laughed and said that he wanted to engage in programming work in the future.
Wang Zhuo said that some students have poor grades in cultural classes and appear to be playful and unwilling to study because their teachers and parents always deny them. This is a vicious circle. What we often call teaching students in accordance with their aptitude only exists in urban families. Here, everyone has only one choice, and many smart children can only go to waste. But once you discover their shining point and open another door for them, they will completely change.
Currently, future classrooms are blooming in Hebei, Sichuan, Hubei, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Chongqing and other places. In order to strengthen communication among teachers in various regions, Li Yan and her colleagues in the project team will arrange targeted communication meetings every month, inviting teachers to share their experiences and synchronization difficulties, and discuss and overcome them together.
At the end of October this year, Li Yan organized Future Classroom to play an AI friendly match with schools in Hong Kong and Macau. After more than a year of implementing the course, Li Yan wanted teachers like Wang Zhuo to take the children out to practice and compete head-on with children from developed areas. In the end, 6 schools and 18 teams signed up.
The education bureau where Wang Zhuo was located learned about the competition and called the principal specifically. They should seize such opportunities for technology exchanges. Wang Zhuo took the students from his team to participate in the competition with anxiety.
He didn't take a break for several weekends. He led students to repeatedly debug their works in the future classroom. If they didn't understand something, he would consult the teacher remotely. Wang Zhuo gritted his teeth and persisted with his children from the preliminary rounds to the semi-finals and then to the finals, and finally won the second place. "Second place, who can believe it! I confirmed it several times and I really got the second place. To be honest, I was more excited than the students. For the first time, I felt that I was a real technology teacher."
The lives of the children of Hebei Liuzao Mingde School have also been greatly changed by the arrival of the future sports field. On the day Tencent's future sports ground was launched, the children always looked at the playground immediately when the teacher was not paying attention. When the bell rang, they rushed to the future sports ground. Some of them patted the plastic hard, some stamped their feet hard to feel the bounce, and some just lay down and rolled on it without doing anything.
Half a year after the sports ground was built, the children started taking new physical education classes. A series of professional physical education courses such as rope skipping and push-ups replaced the boring running.
Li Yan told the story of Li Liqiang and Wang Zhuo in this year's review of the Intellectual and Physical Bicentenary. There was a huge map of China on the screen in the conference room, with 17 provinces (autonomous regions) labeled. 25 future classrooms and 22 future sports fields were marked with star icons on the map.
Li Yan pointed to Xinjiang, where we took Zhao Lina to build a women's football team. She pointed to Guizhou, where Bao Chunlai went to give badminton lessons to her children. The screen switched, "All the works we see now are created by children in the future classroom, including powered cars, 3D printed ice, and programming works."
After participating in the project for a year, Li Yan has a lot of feelings. "It used to be said that protection is always a kind of rejection, but in fact, the standard of protection is in the hands of adults, which is unfair. From the perspective of children, why can't protection be a kind of giving, giving them more opportunities and possibilities?
I didn't understand this before I did the 'Intelligence and Physique Double Hundred'. Until later I went to Guizhou, and when I saw a child over 1.5 meters tall playing basketball on the clay court, I felt like I understood a little bit. He said he wanted to be a basketball player. So why don't we give him a court and let him try it? "
At the same time, the burdens on the shoulders of the members of the project team and school teachers are also heavier. As Wang Zhuo said, "Rejuvenating the country through science and technology is not a slogan. If we want to rejuvenate the country, we must start with education, and education must start with children. We have a heavy burden on us. "
The road is long and difficult, but the children's changes are the best response. It is expected that more children can keep up with the times and learn artificial intelligence and programming knowledge in the classroom, run and jump freely on well-equipped sports fields, and develop all-round moral, intellectual, physical, artistic and physical development.
