National STEM Video Game Challenge Winners Announced!

It’s hard to believe that the National STEM Video Game Challenge has come to a close. The Cooney Center team has just returned from D.C., where we invited the six finalists of the Collegiate and Developer streams of the competition to the Quick-Pitch Competition on Tuesday, March 29. Each team had a total of 20 minutes to present their prototypes and answer questions before a panel of judges at the Pew Center for American Life.

 

We were thrilled to see the energy and creativity that these developers brought to their games, and invigorated by the judges’ lively and provocative conversations — their passion for quality games and nurturing the careers of aspiring developers was inspiring. Our distinguished panel of judges included Warren Buckleitner, Editor, Children’s Technology Review; Alan Gershenfeld, Founder & President, E-Line Media; Eric Huey, ESA‘s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs; Shirley Malcom, Head of Education and Human Resources, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Melvin Ming, Chief Operating Officer, Sesame Workshop; and Ward Tisdale, Director of Global Community Affairs, Advanced MicroDevices (AMD).

On Wednesday, March 30, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra announced the winners of the Developer Competition and presented a video of the Youth Prize winners at The Atlantic’s Technologies in Education Forum at the Newseum. Congratulations to Filament Games’ Dan Norton and Dan White, who received the Grand Prize for You Make Me Sick!, a game that teaches children about the physical structure of bacteria and viruses, as well as how they are spread. Graduate students Derek Lomas (Carnegie Mellon University), Dixie Ching (New York University) and Jeanine Sun (University of California at San Diego) were awarded the Collegiate Prize as well as the Impact Prize for NumbaPower: Numbaland! The collection of four games allows children from kindergarten to grade 4 to construct a set of skills that helps develop their sense of number concepts. The games will be available on different platforms, including the iPad later this spring.

The finalists were:

Collegiate Prize – Traffic Jammin’ – Number Power: Numbaland! – Slime Garden

Grand Prize – A SciTunes Human Body Adventure – You Make Me Sick! – Doc and Bacon Figure Out the World

 

A special note of congratulations goes out to the winners of our Popular Vote, Green World and Ko’s Journey.

We extend our deepest thanks and wish the best of luck to everyone who participated in the National STEM Video Game Challenge for making it such a great success.

 

Learn more about the National STEM Video Game Challenge and read the full press release.