EET student part of winning team

Digital Literacy Contest

A team of three Purdue University students led by a 2008 graduate won the young innovator division of the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition. Amit Pahwa, who will be a senior in electrical and computer engineering technology this fall, is one of the team members.

The team, which proposed a free Web-based contest to help high school government teachers educate students, was awarded $9,000 as one of five winning projects in the Young Innovators category.

In the project, called the Digital Democracy Contest, students compete in teams to answer questions using U.S. government Web sites.

Daniel Scott Poynter, the Purdue philosophy department alumnus who led the team, said there is great potential to increase civic engagement through the information available online.

"We want to help students benefit from new government transparency efforts," Poynter said. "Information overload is real, and though it can cripple, it can also empower students. We are looking for high school government teachers to pilot the contest this fall."

In addition to Pahwa and Poynter, the team includes computer science students George Tebbetts and John Bohlmann.

The Digital Media and Learning Competition, which is in its second year, is designed to find the most novel uses of new media in support of learning. The competition awarded $2 million to individuals, companies, universities and community organizations for projects that employ games, mobile phone applications, virtual worlds, social networks, wikis and video blogs to explore how digital technologies are changing the way that people learn and participate in daily life.

Visit the Digital Literacy Contest Web site.