NTU grabs top prizes for education innovation

2014-12-12

PaGamO, designed by National University associate professor Benson Yeh, won the overall and top e-learning prizes at the inaugural Wharton-QS Stars Awards: Reimagine Education Dec. 9 in Philadelphia.

Yeh attributed the success to the efforts of NTU electrical engineering and computer science students, as well as BoniO, the workshop he organized to enhance education.

Launched during the 2012 winter vacation, PaGamO now boasts around 30,000 players worldwide. Yeh said his inspiration for the game came from opening a massive open online course on probability in Chinese.

The name PaGamO came from the Taiwanese pronunciation of “play the game and learn,” Yeh said. It was designed to help players to amass virtual land, wealth and resources by answering questions correctly.

According to NTU, the PaGamO platform has been applied in a range of educational contexts, such as teaching probability and offering mathematical lectures to K-12 students in the U.S. It has also been adopted by a Fortune 500 company to teach management and leadership.

“We faced some top teams with highly innovative projects involving virtual science labs or 3-D medical anatomy,” Yeh said. “I never imagined we would have won.”

PaGamO shares top honors with the University of Colorado at Boulder, whose PhET Interactive Simulations uses animations to help students learn fundamental scientific principles. The two schools will share a monetary prize of US$50,000.

The competition was sponsored by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and QS Quacquarelli Symonds, publisher of the QS World University Rankings, to promote innovation in education.

Entries came from 427 universities and enterprises across 43 countries. They were judged by a panel of 25 international experts.

Source: Taiwan Today (http://taiwantoday.tw/ct.asp?xItem=225094&CtNode=413)