Kakao wraps second 'AI Rookie Camp,' CEO urges students to become problem-solvers

Kakao said Tuesday it successfully concluded the second cohort of its "Kakao AI Rookie Camp" with a graduation ceremony held at the company's AI campus in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province.

The program was designed to expand AI education opportunities for teenagers outside the greater Seoul area and to cultivate the next generation of AI talent. A total of 100 middle and high school students — from second-year middle school through first-year high school — participated, drawn from Gangwon Province and the Gyeongsang, Jeolla, Jeju and Chungcheong regions. The camp ran in two sessions from Aug. 4 to Aug. 14, each lasting three nights and four days.

Kakao CEO Jeong Shin-a attended the closing ceremony for the second session and presented awards to three outstanding project teams.

"Watching the participants discover problems on their own, define them, and turn them into real products, I was reminded that young people are not simply future talent preparing for tomorrow — they can be problem-solvers creating change right now," Jeong said.

She added that "it is ultimately up to people to decide the direction of technology," and expressed hope that the experience would serve as "a starting point for going beyond using technology well, toward building solutions to the problems you care most about."

The second cohort featured an upgraded curriculum designed to help students immerse themselves more deeply in their projects. Kakao introduced new online pre-learning modules — covering physical AI fundamentals and vibe coding — so that participants could focus on hands-on project work once on site.

The camp also expanded its hands-on equipment to help students raise the quality of their finished projects. Organizers provided sensors, display modules, a laser cutter, and development boards equipped with cameras and microphones, giving students the tools to turn their ideas into working prototypes.

Through this setup, students experienced every stage of AI service development firsthand: identifying and defining a problem, designing an idea, implementing core functions, completing a finished product, validating it from a user perspective, and presenting their work.

Each team was also assigned a mentor to help think through solutions and sharpen the final product through feedback.

The grand prize at the ceremony went to team We:Seat for its "AI Smart Priority Seat" project — an AI-powered management system designed to efficiently operate priority seating for passengers with mobility challenges.

Lee Dae-hyeon, a third-year student at Ulsan Yugok Middle School and a member of the winning team, said the most memorable part of the camp was "the process of verifying and refining ideas together with teammates while integrating AI with hardware." He added that he was glad to have learned "how AI technology becomes a real service, and why collaboration matters."

Kakao said it plans to expand support for building AI capabilities among youth outside the capital region. The company intends to recruit participants for a third AI Rookie Camp in the second half of this year, with the camp itself scheduled for the first half of 2027.

The first cohort of the Kakao AI Rookie Camp was held earlier this year. The grand prize in that round went to team Meca, which presented an early drowsy-driving prevention system aimed at reducing accidents among delivery drivers who frequently work night shifts. The team drew attention for proposing a system that uses AI facial recognition to analyze a driver's condition in real time, sends alerts based on the level of risk detected, and — if warnings persist — triggers a mechanism to pull the vehicle over to the shoulder.