Lee Jae-gyu (center), CEO of Hanwha Energy, and Bucheon High School students Kim Sang-yul and Heo Jin-woo pose for a photo after the grand prize announcement at the “Hanwha Science Challenge” awards ceremony held at Hanwha General Insurance’s Life Campus in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province, on the 14th./Hanwha
Hanwha Group (000880.KS) said on the 17th that two second-year students at Bucheon High School, Kim Sang-yul and Heo Jin-woo, competing as the team “Ajas,” won the grand prize at the 15th Hanwha Science Challenge 2026 for designing an eco-friendly disaster-response system modeled on the way balsam seeds spring outward through elasticity.
The contest was held from the 12th to the 14th at Hanwha General Insurance’s Life Campus in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province.
The Hanwha Science Challenge is a science competition for high school students, launched under Hanwha Group Chairman Seung-youn Kim’s vision of “nurturing young Korean Nobel science laureates.” This year’s contest, sponsored by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Korea Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Creativity, and the Korean National Commission for UNESCO, drew a record 1,088 teams from 214 schools. With this, the competition’s cumulative number of participants surpassed 20,000.
The Ajas team earned high marks for its project, titled “Turning Crisis into Opportunity: A Power-Free Wildfire Response and Restoration System Based on Balsam Snap-Buckling.” Mimicking the snap-buckling structure by which balsam seeds are flung out through elasticity, the system detects wildfire heat, sprays a fire-suppressing agent, and converts debris back into fertilizer, all without an external power source.
Lee Jae-gyu (fourth from right in the second row), CEO of Hanwha Energy, and officials pose for a photo with students participating in the “Hanwha Science Challenge” held at Hanwha General Insurance’s Life Campus in Chungju, North Chungcheong Province, from the 12th to the 14th./Hanwha
The total prize money for this year’s contest was 200 million won ($144,000), among the highest in the country. The grand-prize team received 40 million won, while two gold-prize teams each received 20 million won and two silver-prize teams each received 10 million won. The five winning teams in the grand, gold and silver categories — 10 students in total — will be offered a program to tour leading overseas science institutions and engineering universities, and all teams that reached the finals will be exempt from the document-screening stage when applying for jobs at Hanwha Group in the future.
Lee Jae-kyu, CEO of Hanwha Energy, said, “I hope the time spent with the Hanwha Science Challenge has served as an occasion to broaden students’ horizons of knowledge and to build their perspective on the world.” He added, “Hanwha Group will always support the grand dreams and challenges of young people that will unfold beyond Korea onto the world stage.”