Seventy-five percent of listed venture companies were based in the greater Seoul area as of last year, according to a June report by the Korea Venture Business Association. The concentration of innovative firms around the capital is even sharper in information technology, where core companies and talent cluster in a handful of districts such as Pangyo and Sangam.
Kakao (035720.KS) has stepped in to narrow the regional gap in IT talent and infrastructure. Early this year, the company launched a body with the country's four science and technology institutes to nurture regional artificial intelligence firms, and it has now made a program to build the AI skills of teenagers outside the capital region a regular fixture.
Suh Eun-hee, executive vice president in charge of tech talent development at Kakao, explained the thinking behind the camp during a visit to the AI Rookie Camp held on the 13th at Kakao's AI Campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, in an interview with The Seoul Economic Daily. "In the IT ecosystem, talent is ultimately what matters most," Suh said. "Because IT infrastructure is concentrated in the greater Seoul area, the reality is that students in other regions find it hard even to meet a developer mentor."
AI Rookie Camp is an ESG program Kakao launched in February this year. It is open to students from the second year of middle school through the first year of high school who live outside the capital region. This second edition drew 100 students, split into two groups of 50 who each attended for four days and three nights (the 4th to the 7th and the 11th to the 14th). After learning physical AI theory and practice, solution planning and project development, the students broke into 10 teams to tackle assignments that use AI to solve social problems or everyday inconveniences.
The organizers also paid attention to the age range to improve the educational effect. Park So-i, head of the Kakao AI Rookie Camp task force, said: "Students from the second year of middle school to the first year of high school are seriously thinking about their careers while facing relatively less pressure from college entrance exams." Park added, "Because the curriculum only pays off if students have some coding foundation, we excluded first-year middle school students who are just starting to learn the 'informatics' subject."
Kakao's AI Rookie Camp follows a "build sprint" approach, in which participants run through the entire engineering process — from defining a problem to planning, feedback and building a prototype — in a short period. "The first camp in February focused on the engineering side, which left a little too little time to think deeply about how to solve problems," Park said. "This time we introduced online pre-learning and assignments to raise their understanding of software development in advance, so that during the camp they could experience a full cycle of a project."
At the camp, students repeatedly tried to apply physical AI methods to problems they had encountered in daily life. The "Oneul Badang" team used a plastic bottle and mesh to mimic a taewak — a float that female divers keep on the water's surface while diving — and fitted it with acceleration, temperature and location sensors. The idea came from a team member who lives in Busan and had frequently seen female divers at work.
The "Tteugeup-na" team attached an air-circulation motor to a toy stroller, aiming to address how the inside of a stroller heats up in summer. The "WE: SEAT" team linked pressure sensors in priority seats on public transit with data from transit-card readers so that the color of an LED above a priority seat changes when someone eligible boards. Even when someone not eligible is sitting there, the LED prompts them to naturally give up the seat. The WE: SEAT team drew consistent marks for the logic of its design, its technical implementation and the completeness of its verification, winning the grand prize at the completion ceremony on the 14th.
To let students experience the entire development process, the camp provided Arduino and ESP32 boards, the basic components of physical AI, as teaching materials. Arduino and ESP32 are small boards, sometimes called "tiny computers," that can connect components such as sensors and motors and run them as desired. Developers from Kakao's in-house electronics club served as mentors for students unfamiliar with circuit wiring. A laser cutter was also brought in so that students could quickly turn their drawings into prototypes.
The projects also made free use of generative AI. Students first tested their ideas with generative AI before receiving feedback from mentors, and they also drew on generative AI when preparing their designs. "At first, honestly, I was quite worried that AI might have negative effects on teenagers, such as weakening their thinking skills," Park said. "But during the camp, AI actually served as a lever that let students go beyond the limits of their own knowledge and experience."
Kakao plans to keep focusing on nurturing AI talent. "Even after they finish AI Rookie Camp, we will set up a community so graduates can stay in touch with one another," Suh said. "We will support the development of leaders who look at the world with kind eyes." Suh added, "Once the 'regional AI hubs' we are now pursuing are in place, we are also considering ways to hold youth education programs more often by using that infrastructure." Based on a 50 billion won ($36 million) AI development fund set up last year, Kakao is pursuing a project to build regional AI education and startup infrastructure. It plans to first create a hub space in Busan, and over the long term aims to discover 100 globally innovative firms by 2030.
