Nexon said on the 31st that the Nexon Youth Programming Challenge (NYPC) marks its 10th anniversary this year. Launched in 2016 with the slogan "Coding that changes the world," NYPC has established itself as the largest youth coding competition in Korea.
NYPC introduced problems using Nexon's various game intellectual property (IP) so that even students with no coding experience could participate. Since 2017, more than 4,000 people have taken part in the preliminaries each year, recording a cumulative 40,000 participants over 10 years, 673 finalists, and 193 awardees.
In a survey of NYPC participants conducted to mark the competition's 10th anniversary this year, 52% of the students who took part in the preliminary round of this youth competition were first-time participants, and more than 90% of participants said they intended to return the following year. Notably, 8 out of 10 participants also said they wanted to take on the university team strategy competition "CODE BATTLE," unveiled for the first time this year.
Nexon emphasized that "over the past 10 years, NYPC has helped spread coding culture." One example is the "NYPC Talk Concert." Starting in 2017, it held talk concerts for five consecutive years, inviting experts in cutting-edge technology fields to offer youths guidance on careers and vision.
NYPC awardees have carried out a range of social contribution activities to bridge the digital divide and spread coding culture. In Aug. last year, past NYPC competition awardees visited middle and high schools in Jeju—known as the region with the largest gap in coding education nationwide—to host a Jeju coding education volunteer camp that offered coding study mentoring, level-based coding lectures, and problem-solving sessions.
In Sept. this year, at Nexon's Pangyo headquarters, the NYPC 10th anniversary special event "BE THE NEXT" held NYPC. Among survey respondents who took part in the event, 81.6% turned out to have actual NYPC participation experience, and existing participants voluntarily invited friends and acquaintances to celebrate the 10th anniversary together. A Nexon official said, "This shows that NYPC remains a memorable and shareable experience even after participation."
Nexon said it newly unveiled the university team strategy competition "CODE BATTLE" so participants who grew through NYPC can continue challenging themselves. The company said demand for a stage to experience strategy design using artificial intelligence (AI) and team-based collaboration—beyond solving single algorithm problems—became the starting point for "CODE BATTLE." "CODE BATTLE" is designed so that teams strategically design code and compete within a game environment where there are no predetermined answers.
Looking ahead, NYPC plans to evolve into a venue where participants can naturally learn problem-solving approaches and collaboration experiences required in the AI era amid a changing technological environment. Beyond a competition that checks algorithm skills, it plans to support participants in accepting coding as a language and a thinking tool through experiences of designing ideas and building strategy together.
Kim Jeong-uk, chair of the Nexon Foundation, said, "NYPC has gone beyond a competition to test coding skills to provide experiences of communicating with the world through technology and solving problems," adding, "We will continue to create opportunities for participants to challenge themselves, collaborate, and grow in their own ways."