HONDA The Power of Dreams

The Children's Idea Contest is Honda’s learning activity aimed at fostering the qualities and abilities that children will need to survive in the future world filled with uncertainty through the course of envisioning their dreams and experiencing the importance and joy of creativity. The contest that marked its 20th year in 2022 received a total of 8,250 entries that year.

Over the past 20 years, a cumulative total of 83,000 entries have been submitted. For the past few years, the final review process had been carried out online to comply with the safety measures to prevent the spread of COVID 19 infections. But in 2023, for the first time in three years, it was conducted in a face-to-face setting where all the children participating in the latest contest assembled with big smiles on their faces.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of this activity, Honda Motor Chairman Kuraishi also participated as one of the judges. The submitted ideas covered a wide range of themes from everyday challenges, contemporary trends like computers, robots and AI to social issues pertaining to nature and environment, as well as matters related to communication.

The Children's Idea Contest also took place in Thailand and Vietnam, which led to drawing a grand total of over 9.8 million entries from both countries and Japan combined. Honda believes that this contest provides a great opportunity to nurture the next generation of young people in each country where it is held.

In 2006, Honda launched the Honda Beach Cleanup Project, which was based on the desire to ensure that the next generation will be able to experience the joy of walking barefoot on sandy beaches.The project utilizes the Beach Cleaner, which Honda originally developed based on a desire to use its technologies to find a solution to clean the trash that ends up washed ashore.

In 2022, we marked the 16th anniversary of this project. In 2022, although still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, the project was conducted in 17 locations (17 prefectures) throughout the country. Originally initiated by Honda associates and ex-associates, the project has now expanded its circle of cooperation to include the Honda Group as a whole and local residents across the country, with more than 7,000 participants per year. To date, the project has been conducted 406 times on beaches throughout Japan, and the total amount of trash collected has reached approximately 520 tons.

In Japan, Honda offers educational programs and teaching methods to instructors who engage in traffic safety activities in their local communities. Previous year, a study was conducted to verify the effectiveness of Honda's educational materials in changing people’s behaviors to act more safely. The results showed that with the passage of time, participants’ behavior returned to the level observed before the education, and therefore, continuous education is necessary.

Based on these findings, Honda considered creating educational materials that allowed teachers at elementary schools, kindergartens, and nursery schools to educate children about traffic safety in brief morning and afternoon sessions. In response to the teachers' opinions, Honda focused on making the educational materials easy to use and entertaining for children so that they could raise their awareness on safety behaviors as they enjoy learning about them.

Through this approach, Honda created a titled “Sing, Dance and ‘Stop, Meow!’” for small children in kindergartens and nursery schools, and a digitalized Japanese card game called "Digital Traffic Safety Karuta" for elementary school students. *Karuta : Karuta consist of two types of cards with pictures or writing drawn of them

“Sing, Dance and ‘Stop, Meow!’”was arranged in such a way to help small children learn enjoyingly the basic actions that they needed to take beforehand in order to cross a road safely, which were to “stop”, “look” and “wait”. Simple bodily movements that go along with the tune were added as part of the children’s physical exercise and "Stop Meow!” sign magnets that resemble traffic signs and road markings were installed at hazardous spots created within the premise of kindergartens and nursery schools, based on the concept of making the children get naturally accustomed to the act of “taking a pause” in their daily lives.

The "Digital Traffic Safety Karuta" was created basically as a digitalized version of "Honda Traffic Safety Karuta" The format of this card game was devised to provoke children to think about safety traffic behaviors, such as, traffic rules and appropriate manners by looking at what is illustrated and reading what is written on each picture card to understand the true meaning of each message delivered through words and illustration.

The cards have been created with an animation feature so that students could visually grasp how they should behave safely in various traffic situations. The time spent on teaching them about traffic safety has been designed to be about two minutes per card to allow the teachers to use the cards iteratively in a relatively short period of time without feeling burdensome and arrange their presentation freely by combining multiple cards of their choice according to the length of time they want to spend in each session.

Honda intends to continue working closely with local traffic safety instructors and academic institutions to prepare educational programs on traffic safety that are more effective than ever by proposing innovative methods and creating smart teaching materials to maintain and enhance the effectiveness of these educational tools with an ultimate aim to build a safety society of zero traffic collision fatalities.

As part of the support for the earthquake that occurred near the Turkish and Syrian borders on February 6, 2023, Honda Motor Co., Ltd. donated JPY 10 million to the Japanese Red Cross Society to support the humanitarian relief and recovery effort in the affected areas.