A growing number of Chinese families in New Zealand are enrolling their children in after-school robotics and AI programmes, treating fluency in these fields as essential preparation for the next generation.

Many of those parents are also urging the New Zealand education system to bring AI, coding and robotics into the national curriculum, arguing that early exposure is the biggest lever for preparing students for a technology-driven workforce.

Government response

Pauline Cleaver, acting deputy secretary of Te Poutāhū Curriculum Centre at the Ministry of Education, has noted that the government's 2025 budget includes targeted investment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) — the foundation any classroom AI or robotics programme has to sit on top of.

The private sector fills the gap

Independent institutes are picking up the slack. Auckland's Creative Imagination Laboratory (CILab), founded in 2016 with about a dozen students, now teaches close to 300, with roughly 80% of enrolments coming from Asian families and a fast-growing cohort of primary-school children. iBot Academy NZ, launched by former Beijing University of Technology lecturer James Wang, reports the same pattern across its robotics competition, robot construction and C programming classes.

Parents' view

Parents like Selina Chen — whose son takes robotics classes at CILab while attending Botany Downs Secondary College — say understanding how robots and AI work will be as basic for the next generation as using a computer or smartphone was for theirs, and want to see the subjects embedded properly in primary and secondary school rather than left at introductory level.

Why it matters

Whether change comes from the top down or the bottom up, the direction is clear: AI literacy is moving from optional enrichment to expected foundation, and families are no longer content to wait for the system to catch up.