Congratulations to ITP Alumnus, Jared Lamenzo (’05), Mohit SantRam (’06) and Kuan Huang (’06) for winning one of the Digital Media & Learning Awards from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

 http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.5106073/k.A5AF/Award_Recipients.htm

Digital Media & Learning Competition
2009 Award Recipients
Winners of the Competition were drawn from two categories: Innovation in Participatory Learning ($30,000 to $250,000) and Young Innovators ($5,000 to $30,000). Innovation awards support projects that demonstrate new modes of participatory learning, in which people take part in virtual communities, share ideas, comment on one another’s projects, and advance goals together. Young Innovator awards — designed to encourage young people aged 18-25 to think boldly about “what comes next” in participatory learning and to contribute to making it happen — will aid recipients in bringing their most visionary ideas from the “garage” stage to implementation.

WildLab

• Grant Amount: $195,000 (Innovation in Participatory Learning Award, 2009)
• Principal Investigator: Jared Lamenzo, Mediated Spaces, Inc., Brooklyn, NY

Project Summary
By applying the latest mobile phone technology to K-12 participatory science, WildLab engages students in collaborative citizen science and encourages local environmental stewardship. Using GPS-enabled, internet-connected iPhones as data collection devices, WildLab allows students to report their scientific observations to each other and to the larger scientific community. In the classroom, students can send their data to sponsoring institutions for analysis, posit their own questions, and develop their own line of inquiry based on their field experiences.