Kolon (002020) said on the 30th that its nonprofit foundation, Flower and the Little Prince, has launched a mobile education program built around a hydrogen truck, called Eco Long Long to the Next.
The program is a hands-on course in which children learn how energy and the environment are linked and design a sustainable future. Using a specially built hydrogen truck, participants can experience various forms of clean energy and ways of running the planet both inside and outside the vehicle.
The first class was held on the 29th at Ilsin Elementary School in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province. Outside the vehicle, students learned the principles of hydrogen energy, and inside they tried out thermal, wind and solar power generation. They then used "energy and carbon tokens" to choose how energy would be produced and to allocate it across different parts of a city, running a planet of their own.
Every part of the experience was tied to the token system, so energy output and carbon emissions shifted with the students' choices, and the results were reflected in the planet's environmental indicators in real time. That allowed students to grasp intuitively how their energy choices and consumption affect the global environment.
"What makes this program meaningful is that children do not just learn about energy but actually get to run a planet," a Kolon official said. "We hope the experience of seeing their own choices lead to changes in the planet gives them a reason to think about a sustainable future."
Since April 2009, the Eco Long Long outreach program has run 5,700 sessions at about 2,430 schools, with 165,300 students taking part in total. Kolon also operates Eco Long Long Cube, clean-energy exhibition and experience centers, in Seoul's Magok district and in Gimcheon, North Gyeongsang Province.
