Difficulty: Challenger (Level 2)
An 11-year-old boy in China taught himself programming, physics and chemistry. Then, he wrote 600 lines of code to build a rocket.
Yan Hongsen has been called “rocket boy” on mainland social media. He is a Primary Five pupil from Zhejiang province in eastern China.
Since kindergarten, he has taken online programming courses. He has also studied physics and chemistry through books, videos and forums with astronomy enthusiasts.
Starting in August 2022, Hongsen spent 10 months building his first home-made solid-fuel rocket.
In June last year, he launched his first rocket. However, shortly after the rocket launched, its booster failed to deploy its parachute after separation. The remaining components also sustained damage, leading to its crash.
After analysing the failure, Hongsen is modifying his second version of the rocket, hoping to launch it again. In his latest video, he showed over 600 lines of code he wrote for the latest rocket’s flight control system.
