Students Win Innovation Award

04-20-2009

CS undergraduate students John Bohlmann and George Tebbetts, along with Amit Pahwa and project leader Daniel Poynter, received a 2009 Digital Media and Learning Competition Youth Innovator Award. The award was sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and presented by Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) on Friday, April 17 for their Digital Democracy Contest (DDC). This recognition includes a $9,000 award to fund their project.

The Digital Democracy Contest (DDC) is a new initiative of the group's Digital Literacy Contest (DLC). The DDC challenges high school students to improve their Internet searching abilities and discover the wealth of interesting government information now available online. The contest will help them sort through the information overload online to find what they truly need.

High school teachers involved in the DDC project administer the contest to their students. Using online government data web sites like the Library of Congress, USA.gov, FedWorld.gov, or the Sunlight Foundation's projects, students are given twenty minutes to answer ten questions. Points are awarded for correct answers, and students are penalized for incorrect answers. The Digital Democracy team then encourages student and teacher feedback to produce new games to promote online government data literacy.

From over 700 submissions, the Digital Democracy Contest was one of 14 projects named as winners of the Digital Media and Learning Competition. This award makes it possible for the DDC team to provide the contest free of charge.

Congratulations to Bohlmann, Tebbetts, Pahwa, and Poynter for this recognition for their hard work and