Spotlight MacArthur Foundation

MacArthur’s Digital Media and Learning Competition Winners Announced

Filed at 8:19 am on April 17, 2009 • Leave a comment

Those three areas of investigation are among 19 that will be funded in the second year of the Digital Media and Learning Competition funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and administered by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC). The $2 million competition is part of a larger $50 million investment in how young people are changing the way they learn through digital media.

“There is nothing like being able to make music to inspire somebody to learn to program,” says Dan Trueman, a founder of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) and one of the 2008 winners. The members of his orchestra, which include music and computer science majors, use an open source programming language to compose and play music with their laptops.

The 2009 winners, announced April 16, are an equally innovative bunch. They include:

DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea, a program run by Constance Penley at the University of California at Santa Barbara, engages middle and high school students in 200 classrooms around the world in monitoring, analyzing and sharing information about the declining global fish population. The population can have a potentially devastating effect on the ecosystem and food scarcity. DigitalOcean uses multi-disciplinary teams of students, scientists and new media experts partnering with Google Ocean, NASA GLOBE and ePals to focus on the future of the seas.

Playpower: Radically Affordable Computer-Aided Learning, a program run by Jeremy Douglas at the University of California at San Diego, uses a $12 TVC (TV-computer) as a platform for learning games to improve educational access for millions of children in the developing world. Playpower is working with partners in Brazil, Ghama, India and the United States to build an open-source Software Development Kit from which local organizations can create their own learning games.

Talkers and Doers, a program run by Alan Gershenfeld of E-Line Ventures of Montclair, N.J., teaches at-risk youth and young adults about entrepreneurship via games that focus on areas of interest to youth, such as fashion, music, games and comics. The program integrates real-world learning, mentors, opportunities and services and encourages kids to use their social networks to develop real money-making opportunities.

This is the first year the competition was opened to international applications as well as young people.

International winners include M-Ubuntu: Teachers Building an M-Literacy Collaboratory, a South African effort to use inexpensive mobile phone technology to empower local teachers to connect with mentors in the United States; History Game Canada, which helps 12- to 18-year-olds learn Canadian history by allowing them to imagine historical events from different perspectives and even alter the outcomes; Tecno.Tzotzil: Participatory Learning Among Indigenous Children in Chiapas, an effort to promote participatory learning in one of Mexico’s poorest communities; and Women Aloud: Videoblogging for Empowerment (WAVE), which gives a voice online to Indian women aged 18-25 to address issues such as health, the environment, employment, access to basic necessities, education, democracy and gender equality.

The Young Innovators Award winners are: Cellcraft: Exploring the Cell Through Computer Games, which offers a new way to engage middle and high school students in learning biology; CivicsLab.com, which engages young people in civic participation by giving them virtual control of decision-making in their communities; Digital Democracy Contest, which helps young people explore, use and navigate complex government information data sets; Networked Newsroom, which allows high school and college journalism students to upload story ideas, leads, photos, videos and other information and then supplement one another’s work and publish final stories to a public wiki; and Origami: Enfolding Real and Virtual Learning, a file-sharing system that allows students to trade learning resources without interrupting lectures.

The remaining 2009 winners are: DevInfo GameWorks: Changing the World One Game at a Time, which expands the way young people learn about the condition of humanity around the world;