The winners of the National STEM Video Game Challenge, hosted by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, were announced today by the U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra. The competition was designed to help spur interest in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) by tapping into students’ engagement with video games.
Twelve students in grades 5-8 were awarded the Youth Prize for designing innovative, well-balanced, educational games, with a special emphasis on STEM. The 12 winners were chosen from 500 total entries. Each of the winners received a laptop computer equipped with software, as well as a $2,000 donation that will go to the school or nonprofit organization of the student’s choice. Check out the video below for more about those students:
In the Developer Prize category, Filament Games’ Dan Norton and Dan White received the grand prize for their game, You Make Me Sick!, which aims to teach students about the structure of bacteria and viruses, as well as how they are spread. Norton and White will receive $50,000 to create the game. For now, you can check out the prototype to get a feel for what it might look like.
Lastly, in the Collegiate and Impact Prizes category of the competition, three graduate students from Carnegie Mellon University, New York University, and the University of California at San Diego won $50,000 to create a collection of four games for K-4 students to learn number concepts called NumberPower: Numbaland! The prototype for that game is here.