Nexon Co., Ltd. announced that the Nexon Foundation, together with Vibras Korea, will open a beta version of ‘BIKO (abbreviation for Bebras Informatics Korea)’, a free programming learning platform to bridge the digital gap among youth and expand the programming base.
In July of last year, the Nexon Foundation and Vibras Korea paid attention to the reality of a lack of systematic programming education and quality free educational content, and announced the development of ‘Vibras Programming (tentative name)’, a learning platform where anyone can learn programming for free. With this beta opening, the official name of the site was confirmed as ‘BIKO’.
‘BIKO’ is a systematic education site that covers everything from cultivating computational thinking, which is the basis of programming, to basic text coding and in-depth learning. In this beta version, a total of 100 questions are included, including NYPC (Nexon Youth Programming Challenge) past questions. It contains various types of programming problems at home and abroad.
In particular, the ‘Blank Challenge’ problem, a type of ‘Blank Challenge’ problem introduced for the first time in Korea by ‘BIKO’, allows even beginners in programming to easily solve the problem because the correct answer can be derived through the preceding and following codes without any knowledge of coding grammar.
In order to expand the base of programming education, Nexon added a ‘Class’ function that allows learning and evaluation between students and information teachers so that ‘BIKO’ can be used as an online learning platform in public education, and increased the number of problems and video content explaining problem solving. It is scheduled to be officially launched at the end of 2023 by improving convenience and provision.
Nexon has issued a recruitment notice to elementary, middle, and high schools across the country since the 24th to run the ‘BIKO’ pilot class, and plans to hold an online briefing session. A total of 30 schools will be selected and a variety of feedback from teachers and students will be collected through a three-week pilot operation.
Kim Dong-yoon, CEO of Vibras Korea, said, “There has been a large gap in programming education depending on the given environment, such as country, region, gender, and income, and the entry barrier to text coding is high, making it difficult to expand the base of programming.” He added, “In-depth in coding from the basics.” “We will continue to work with the Nexon Foundation to ensure that ‘BIKO’, which teaches education stages in detail, can become an educational platform that is of great help to future generations who will lead the 4th Industrial Revolution.”
Kim Jeong-wook, Chairman of the Nexon Foundation, said, “‘BIKO’ is in full swing with the goal of becoming an ‘integrated coding education platform’ that allows anyone to easily and independently learn within a systematic curriculum.” “I hope that children and teenagers in Korea can experience the joy of programming,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Nexon Foundation has been operating the ‘Nexon Youth Programming Challenge (NYPC)’ since 2016 to increase youth’s interest in programming and enhance their capabilities, and is conducting the ‘High Five Challenge’, a Novel Engineering education project. We are taking the lead in strengthening the problem-solving abilities of children and adolescents and expanding the programming base.
Source: Pangyo Techno Valley Official Newsroom
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