Announcing the Overall Winners
Roosbeek (BE), December 2011 - Belgian entry Monkey Tales Games has won the MEDEA Professional-Production Award 2011 and Austrian entry The Merchant of Venice has won the MEDEA User-Generated Award 2011. This was announced during the MEDEA Awards Ceremony on 24 November 2011 as part of the Media & Learning Conference in the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training in Brussels.
Monkey Tales Games is a series of 3D video games to support the learning of maths created in 2011 by die Keure Educatief and Larian Studios from Belgium. The series is made up of five exciting and fun video games with age-specific themes where the player has to solve 3D puzzles. Monkey Tales Games can be used by teachers in class, but they are mainly intended for home use to help students practice the maths they learn in class.
Swen Vincke, founder of Larian Studios and Vicky Vermeulen, project leader at die Keure Educatief, explains, "Did we expect to win? No, we were standing here last year with our pilot project; we thought last year that we were going to win at least one prize, so we were disappointed that we didn't get anything. The last thing I expected this year was that we would win something and … two prizes … that's WOW!"
The Merchant of Venice is an online educational game, created in 2011 by Prof Uwe Gutwirth from the University of Education Salzburg in Austria. This multi-user game plays in Venice in the fifteenth century. The players (learners) are Venetian merchants who have to earn money by trading with foreign countries and by investing their profit in real estate.
The game is mainly aimed at accountancy students, who can learn and practice double-entry bookkeeping in a fun way. They also learn how to how to make decisions in a team, think about connections and networks, apply accounting, analyse results, and draw conclusions.
Both winners are games that highlight the extent to which gaming is being taken seriously in education and training. Mathy Vanbuel, Chairperson of the MEDEA Awards judges committee, speaking at the MEDEA Awards Ceremony said, "The power of media in education lies in the interactivity they excite in the learners: educational media are most effective when they engage and involve the learners emotionally, intellectually, physically, or in any other way. This probably explains why this year we have two games for learning as our main winners."