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While other kids might finish their day off with a bedtime story, Mark Zuckerberg’s daughters are busy learning to code. We guess someone has got to inherit the keys to the Metaverse...
In a recent interview, Priscilla Chan, co-chief executive officer of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) who married the head of Facebook (or should we now say Meta) in 2012, discussed her husband’s bedtime routine with their two daughters, five-year-old Maxima and four-year-old August.
“Sometimes they will read books together. Sometimes they’ll code together,” Chan told The Sunday Times Magazine. She explained that it’s an important skill for kids to learn nowadays and it’s visually stimulating.
“Mark has been doing that with August since she turned three,” she said.
As for when her two kids will be allowed on social media platforms, Chan replied: "[N]ot until they’re 13 because that’s the rule.” The interview comes just weeks after revelations in the media showed that Instragam, which is also owned by Facebook, was aware the app was toxic for teenage girls, exacerbating body-image issues for one-in-three teenage girls in the US and UK.
Earlier this year, Zuckerberg shared a photo of August coding on his laptop, adding in the comments: “Teaching a kid to type is one of the greatest tests of patience I have ever experienced.”
“August types at literally 1-2wpm [words per minute],” he continued. “And when she gets a few letters into a word and then makes a mistake and accidentally presses delete three times instead of once and then has to retype the whole word, I feel like I’m just going to lose it.”
Zuckerberg reportedly taught himself how to code after he received his first computer as a sixth-grader using a C++ for Dummies book. In 2003, Zuckerberg coded the predecessor for Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard: Facemash, a website that compared photographs of students and asked users to pick who was the most attractive. By January 2004, Zuckerberg had dropped this project and began writing code for a new website called "TheFacebook."
The rest is history, as they say. Seventeen long years later, Facebook may be one of the world's biggest social media platforms and one of the most valuable companies, but it comes with a considerable amount of controversy and criticism. Now, it's apparently facing its next incarnation. Just this week, Zuckberger announced the rebranding of the company as Meta and detailed lofty plans to build a new immersive extension of the Internet: the Metaverse.
