ALTHOUGH he’s still in high school himself, Zhang Yu is already teaching classes for the citys Massive Online Open Class (MOOC) system.

In the program, which encourages local middle- and high-school students to acquire extracurricular knowledge on their own. Zhang is the youngest teacher.

Currently in 12th grade at the High School Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhang produced eight videos about his approach to scientific exploration.

The system officially runs from March 5 and his lectures named “About Black” have attracted about 2,000 subscribers on MOOC’s website (http://gzmooc.edu.sh.cn), making them the second most popular among the 21 currently available lectures.

“It’s not a difficult task for me to teach lessons as I have been tutoring my fellow schoolmates in scientific innovation for two years and students in four other schools since last year,” Zhang told Shanghai Daily.

Zhang has won the sixth biannual Shanghai Mayor’s Innovation in November and won several international innovation contests before that, including the Odyssey of the Mind problem-solving contest and Destination Imagination.

He attributed his achievements to persistent curiosity and willpower to challenge authorities and solve problems.

“The knowledge we are taught may be right or wrong, but it is definitely wrong not to ask why,” he said. “So I will show other students how I question knowledge I learned as a natural rule or common sense by other students and designed experiments to verify them and convince myself.”

In his first video, he raised a lot of questions about light and color as his high school physics course only taught him that color is a visual perceptual property corresponding in humans and white light can be separated into seven colors when passing through a prism.

He was not satisfied with the definition given by textbooks or online search results for black, saying black is the result of absence of all visible lights.

“How did people make the conclusion? Why is black not human’s visual perceptual property corresponding to black light? How can we see a black hole if it can absorb light?” Zhang named some of the questions bothering him.

“These questions sound naive, but I really could not explain them,” he added, “So I decided to find answers by myself.”

He designed two simple experiments that will bring students to the conclusion that black light doesn’t exist.

But at the end of the video, he asks students to find flaws with his research, which he will lecture on in later videos.

Via the lectures, Zhang said he wished to show independent studying methods and to cultivate skepticism and analytical thinking among other students. He also hopes students can explore problems they encounter in study and life with methods or tips mentioned in the lectures.

Feedback has been positive.

“I have never thought so much about black,” said Zhong Xiaoyu from Lansheng Fudan Middle School. “The lectures inspired me (to discover) a new world of physics.”

“This course also opened my mind,” said Zhang Diqi from the Shanghai No. 8 High School. “We always ask ‘why’ in life. Why not make assumptions and then verify them on our own?”

The course also inspired subscribers’ discussion.

Zhang is glad about the feedback.

“The problems we face in life go beyond examinations and need us to observe, think and explore,” he said. “No one can design a routine for you, telling you that you can solve this problem after attending this class while others are needless.

“When exploring answers, we may find something we learn is useful while something else is useless. But when we find the right answers, I can feel extreme happiness,” he added.

He said the MOOC website can only give students some basic guidance while scientific exploration needs practice.

Despite being so successful, some teachers didn’t think Zhang was a good student because he did not spend too much time on academic studies to secure high scores, but on activities some deem “unnecessary.”

By standing out, however, he managed to get into the High School Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University, considered one of the most prestigious public schools in the city.

“I guess my experience convinced the school about my potential,” he said.

The high school provides a broader platform to continue his exploration with professional tutors in and out of the school under the STEM program.

In the 10th grade, he joined the Odyssey of the Mind competition and became frustrated with the technical terms in engineering, but, with the help of a coach, Zhang and his team won China’s OM Championship with a design for a three-wheeled vehicle that can move in all directions.

When studying color and light, he also found a way to identify whether the green color in food is natural or synthetic by using the camera of a smart phone.

“You only have to install a color filter in front of the camera lens of your phones,” he said. “If the green color is natural, it will be red in the camera, but if it is synthetic, you will see black in the picture.”

With this invention, he won the first prize at the Shanghai Youth Science and Technology Contest in March 2015.

He was invited to be a volunteer instructor at his school’s STEM Lab and is also coaching students in four other schools in creative thinking and leadership.

In recognition of his research work and contribution to the STEM community, he was presented the Shanghai Mayor’s Innovation Award in November last year.

In 2014, he inspired other students to participate in a science contest, but had to drop out before the contest began to concentrate on his academic performance.

“It was a difficult decision, but I eventually quit to focus on my lessons,” Zhang said.

Later, he decided that he would only be applying to American universities, which opened up his schedule because he doesn’t have to study for China’s college entry exams.