Kakao Provides Digital Citizenship Education to 250,000 People Over 10 Years

Students participating in Kakao Impact's 'Friendly Digital World' are taking a commemorative photo.
[Photo by Kakao]

Kakao's corporate foundation, Kakao Impact, announced on the 31st that the cumulative number of beneficiaries of the 'Friendly Digital World' program, which has been operated for 10 years, has exceeded 250,000.

Friendly Digital World is a digital citizenship education program for children and adolescents run by Kakao Impact in collaboration with the Blue Tree Foundation. It supports establishing proper digital citizenship awareness and values. As the longest-running project in the private sector of digital citizenship education in Korea, it has visited 2,339 schools and 11,434 classes, educating a total of 254,760 people.

Friendly Digital World consists of 'Visiting School Education,' which teaches concepts and responses to personal information protection and cyberbullying through play and lessons, and 'Teacher Training,' which helps teachers educate students in daily life. It also includes 'In-house Instructor Operation' to enable nationwide outreach.

The visiting school education, which provides grade-specific customized curricula according to the level of understanding, recently incorporated content to help understand artificial intelligence (AI) and deepfake technologies and respond to related crimes.

Additionally, since 2022, the education area has been expanded nationwide. Each year, more than 30% of the education has been provided in island and mountainous regions, and up to this year, visits have been made to about 530 schools.

Satisfaction was also high. In a teacher satisfaction survey conducted last year, 92.6% responded that they were satisfied, and 95.8% said they would recommend the program.

Ryu Seok-young, director of Kakao Impact, said, "We will strengthen AI literacy education to quickly respond to rapidly changing digital changes such as deepfakes and continuously develop curricula reflecting these changes."