Nexon Foundation (Chairman Kim Jung-wook) announced that it has signed a three-party memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Korea Bebras Informatics Education Association (Chairman Kim Dong-yoon) and the Daejeon Institute of Education Information (Director Lee Young-joo), an affiliate of the Daejeon Metropolitan Office of Education, to strengthen computational thinking and information education capabilities based on the free, integrated coding education platform BIKO.

This agreement marks the second collaboration between BIKO and a regional public education system, following the MOU Nexon Foundation and the Korea Bebras Informatics Education Association signed with the Daegu Metropolitan Office of Education in December last year. Together with the Daejeon Institute of Education Information, the partners will support teacher training and student instruction for elementary, middle, and high school teachers and students across the jurisdiction through February 2027, working to enhance information education capacity in Daejeon’s school classrooms.

Under the agreement, the parties will jointly develop and operate teacher training programs. They will run both job-related training and voluntary training programs, and provide lecture materials, hands-on practice resources, assignments, and evaluation rubrics. For teachers responsible for information education instruction, they will share analyses of past exam questions and ways to connect them with classroom teaching. In addition, they will operate and support professional learning communities by introducing best-practice lesson cases in information (SW) education and providing mentoring.

They will also provide systematic support for student instruction—from providing educational materials to advanced learning aimed at competition preparation. The partners will supply lesson-operation resources such as unit-by-unit lesson plans, activity worksheets, and assessment tools, and will establish learning tracks to help students improve step by step, including Bebras Challenge pre-learning and solution/explanation sessions as well as preparation tracks for competitions such as the Nexon Youth Programming Challenge (NYPC) and the Korean Olympiad in Informatics (KOI).

Kim Jung-wook, Chairman of Nexon Foundation, said, “We hope that through BIKO, students in the Daejeon region will be able to engage with information education in a structured way and build their interest and capabilities in programming,” adding, “We will actively support ongoing expansion of cooperation with regional public education so that more students nationwide can develop computational thinking and coding competency.”

Nexon and Nexon Foundation officially launched BIKO, a free integrated coding education platform, in February 2024 together with the Korea Bebras Informatics Education Association to strengthen young people’s coding capabilities. In addition, HelloMaple, a free block-coding platform released based on the MapleStory IP, has been steadily used in digital education settings through partnerships with schools and educational institutions nationwide.

This article was translated from the original that appeared on INVEN.