18th delina Innovation Award: Gamification wins the race several times over
Winners in four categories announced - honouring innovative digital education projects

As part of the LEARNTEC exhibition and congress for digital education, Messe Karlsruhe today honoured four companies, educational institutions and service providers for their outstanding achievements in this field with the delina Award for the 18th time. PHYWE Systeme, Aschaffenburg Technical University, the Hessian State Fire Brigade School and gamelynk.io took first place in each of the four categories ‘Early Childhood Education and School’, “University”, ‘Training and Further Education’ and ‘Society and Lifelong Learning’. A jury of 16 experts from companies, universities, schools and corporate training had spent the past few months scrutinising the applications for factors such as technical innovation, a targeted didactic concept, individuality and creativity.
‘In an increasingly volatile world, it takes a conscious decision to be a lifelong learner,’ said Market Director René Naumann in his welcoming address. However, this requires a high level of motivation. ‘Digital solutions can support people's intrinsic motivation to keep developing by making learning more fun and knowledge easier to understand.’ The topic of gamification, i.e. learning through playful methods or incentives, therefore runs like a common thread through this year's winners - from game-based learning at universities to shooters that support vocabulary training.
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The winning projects are:
Early childhood education and schools: PHYWE Systeme GmbH & Co. KG/ 3DQR GmbH for their ‘TESS Augmented Reality’ project
TESS visualises scientifically complex concepts. Invisible operating principles are made visible by adding augmented reality to existing experiments. This enables pupils to grasp this content intuitively and understand it more easily. Carolin Schlein, Product Manager, PHYWE Systeme GmbH & Co. KG: "We are speechless. Thank you very much for this great award. Our motivation is to make science lessons even more innovative and modern. This form and this recognition for our work mean a great deal to us."


University: Aschaffenburg University of Applied Sciences as project manager of the "AdLer" project (in cooperation with Kempten University of Applied Sciences)
Game-based learning goes university: The aim of the AdLer (Adaptive Digital Learning Spaces) project is to create 3D learning worlds intuitively with an authoring tool and thus make learning in higher education more interactive and appealing. Prof Dr Jörg Abke, Technical University of Aschaffenburg as project leader: "For us, this is an overwhelming success of a project that we were convinced of from the very beginning. However, we never imagined that we would be so well received by the community, especially against such strong competition."
Training and further education: Hessian State Fire Service School (in cooperation with Cininet) for its project ‘Autonomous training for fire brigade group leaders for PC and VR'
The first application of its kind for the fire service profession allows users to realistically train operational scenarios, including worst-case scenarios. It can be used either as a VR or desktop application, making emergency services more confident in the event of an emergency. Chief Fire Officer Dr Heiko Neumaier accepted the delina: "This is a great honour for our company. We are pioneers in this field throughout Germany. The delina naturally takes us a step further, makes us better known and also takes us another step forward in terms of training."


Society and lifelong learning: gamelynk.io (in cooperation with the Institute of Romance Studies - University of Kassel) for their project ‘Brains n' Bullets’
With a keen sense for the needs of digitally-savvy learners, the shooter Brains n' Bullets was created as a system in which flashcard learning becomes a playful experience. Learning is not an end in itself here, but an integral part of the game's progress.
Founder and Managing Director Simon Dzierzawa: "This is a huge honour. You develop a game like this for a long time in silence, in a lonely little room. So it's all the more surprising when you're honoured here at such a big trade fair. And we're definitely taking away a huge packet of motivation today."
Digital learning expert and jury member Sünne Eichler: "We, the delina jury, were faced with the challenge of nominating 3 submissions per category from many great ideas and selecting the winner. And I would like to emphasise very strongly that, regardless of today's winner, all the nominated projects and even many more are worthy of an award and deserve visibility."
The runners-up are:
Education and training
2nd place: vhw-Bundeverband für Wohnen und Stadtentwicklung e.V./ Micromate
3rd place: Festo SE & Co. KG/ ePlayces
Early childhood education and school
2nd place: Arolsen Archives
3rd place: Tutoring for All gUG/ InSL e.V.
University
2nd place: University of Kassel & Bern University of Applied Sciences
3rd place: OTH Amberg-Weiden/ 3spin Learning
Society and lifelong learning
2nd place: Elina Hafer & Bastian Hafer GbR
3rd place: Filmboard Karlsruhe e. V./ Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences - Institute for Intelligent Interaction and Immersive Experience (Institute IIIX)