Kolon Group uses AI to help elementary students tackle climate crisis

Kolon Group announced Thursday that it held a camp where elementary school students used AI to find solutions to the climate crisis.

Kolon Group's nonprofit foundation "Kkotgwa Eorin Wangja" (The Flower and the Little Prince) ran the 10th Eco Long Long Plus Camp over three days beginning Tuesday at Kolon One and Only Tower in Seoul's Magok district. Eco Long Long is Kolon's flagship environmental education program, visiting elementary schools nationwide in specially built mobile education vehicles since 2009 and reaching more than 160,000 students at over 2,400 schools.

This year, 72 sixth-graders from elementary schools across the country joined the camp as members of an "eco-friendly energy expedition," working to solve urban problems — including ground subsidence, flash flooding and urban heat islands — facing a city in environmental crisis.

A highlight this year was the AI Future City Simulator, a vibe-coding program developed in-house by Eco Long Long, which let students test their climate solutions in real time. Through the tool, students visualized the transformation of a polluted city into a clean one, making it easy to review and share their ideas.

Participants also toured Kolon One and Only Tower, which holds LEED Gold green building certification, learning about high-efficiency eco-friendly technologies such as solar panels and geothermal heating systems. Inside the building's environmental exhibition center, Eco Long Long Cube, students completed missions to learn the principles behind renewable energy sources including hydrogen, wind and solar power.

Kim Seung-woo, a student from Daedo Elementary School in Seoul, said the camp left a strong impression. "Watching climate crisis news always made me anxious, but seeing a city transformed by our own ideas through the AI simulator was both amazing and reassuring," he said, adding that he would pay closer attention to environmental problems and solutions around him going forward.