From 3 to 30 July 2024, the group travelled from Seoul to Sinan County, stayed with host families, and 14 of them joined an ecology camp with students from an island high school.
From 3 to 30 July 2024, 26 teenagers from the United States spent a month in Korea on The Experiment program, run in Korea by Better World. The program covered peace, history, culture, language and cultural heritage, and took the group to Seoul, Busan, Mokpo, Gwangju and Sinan County.
The visitors met Korean young people along the way and stayed with Korean host families, taking part in the daily life of a household. Through heat and heavy rain they visited historical sites and UNESCO heritage sites. They also spent time on painful periods of Korean history and on how the country recovered from them.
One part of the month was an ecology camp on Dochodo, an island in Sinan County. According to the Korean education newspaper Gyoyuk Yeonhap Sinmun, the camp ran for five days from 25 to 29 July at the Island Ecology Institute and was organized jointly by Better World and the institute. Fourteen U.S. high school students were paired one to one with 14 students from Docho High School. Under the theme of ecology and sustainability, they explored a forest, a tidal flat and local fish, cleaned a beach, and watched the night sky. They also studied island culture: a tea ceremony, making traditional tea sweets, and producing sea salt.
The same report describes the meals as part of the program. Students made gimbap, fried fish they had caught with a traditional drag net, and boiled crabs and sea snails gathered on the tidal flat. A teacher accompanying the U.S. students told the newspaper that the camp had been full and worthwhile, and that finding sustainability within ecology and traditional culture had changed her way of thinking.
Better World has hosted U.S. teenagers on this program since 2009. In 2025, 15 students came from 16 July to 8 August under the theme of Korean language and culture, studying Korean for four hours a day in Seoul. In 2026, two groups arrived on 14 July for about three weeks of learning on Korean culture and peace building.
