CJ OliveNetworks teaches elementary students self-driving car coding
A CJ OliveNetworks worker delivers a lecture for elementary school students in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province. Courtesy of CJ OliveNetworks
CJ OliveNetworks, the information technology services affiliate of CJ Group, is running a hands-on coding camp for elementary school students in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, to teach them how artificial intelligence (AI) and self-driving cars work, the company said Tuesday.
The AX Creative Camp is part of the Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education’s Sinnaneun Gongyu Hakgyo, or “Exciting Sharing School,” program. AX refers to “AI transformation,” the use of AI across business operations. This is the second year the company has held the camp, in which employees use their AI expertise to teach coding classes as part of its corporate social responsibility work.
The education office’s program is an after-school learning platform built with local community groups to help students find their interests and learn on their own. Some 130,000 students took part in about 7,200 programs last year, covering arts, sports and AI.
This year’s camp is open to elementary students in the area covered by the Bucheon office of education. Lessons move step by step from the basic principles of self-driving technology to block coding, a beginner method of programming by snapping together command blocks, and then to driving model cars.
CJ OliveNetworks employees serve as technical mentors, explaining the concepts at a level children can follow and guiding them through each task.
At the first session on Saturday, students learned how self-driving vehicles sense their surroundings and respond. They built model cars and wrote code that controls each car based on the colors and distances its sensors detect. Using conditional statements and loops, basic programming tools that tell a computer what to do and when to repeat it, they saw how a car processes information and makes decisions.
In the second session on Saturday, students will design algorithms for various situations and program their cars to complete tasks on a course that recreates real road conditions. They will also present their own ideas for future self-driving cars.
The company said it plans to expand education programs for young people to build AI skills and help close educational gaps.
This article was published with the assistance of generative AI and edited by The Korea Times.