A Chinese teenage boy, dedicated to DIY rockets, has inspired many by gaining admission to a university’s aerospace engineering programme this year.
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Zhang Shijie, 18, hails from a village in central China’s Hunan province. His passion for rocket making ignited at 14, after watching a live broadcast of a rocket launch with his father.
Recently, he joyfully announced that he has been accepted into the aerospace engineering major at Shenyang Aerospace University, one of China’s premier aerospace institutions.
With no prior knowledge in rocket construction, Zhang turned to short video platforms to learn, absorbing information from DIY rocket videos shared by others. By November 2023, Douyin, the mainland Chinese version of TikTok, had 4.7 million scientific experiment videos, with water-powered rocket videos alone increasing eightfold that year.
Zhang’s secondary teacher, Long Yanjiao, noted that the internet was “immensely helpful” in nurturing Zhang’s passion, especially given the limited resources at his village school.
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