Two in a row for Make Real & ICE with Bett Awards

After a well-deserved break over the Christmas holidays, we hit the ground running in January with plenty of projects to crack on with and events to prepare for.

In the midst of all that, we also had another award ceremony to attend – this time, our work with the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the CityZen game, had been shortlisted in the Bett Awards for the Secondary Free Digital Content App or Open Educational Resource Award.

It was our first time being shortlisted for these particular awards. The vast majority of our learning content is created for use in workplaces, although some of these apps do see excellent use by our partners such as Basingstoke College of Technology. And when we saw the incredible competition we were up against in our category, including the likes of the BBC, we settled in to enjoy watching the event.

But to our total shock (as you can hear in this video), host Lucy Porter announced that CityZen had come out on top.

The judges “applauded the very strong user-centric design which underpinned the impact, as well as the inclusion of teamwork and presentation skills. This makes for a tool that ignites passion for civil engineering, which was reflected in the student voices supporting the submission.”

The game is targeted at 16–18-year-olds and forms part of the annual CityZen competition, which promotes civil engineering careers to college students. Teams collaborate throughout the competition, firstly playing the game we built with ICE to learn what sort of real-life projects a civil engineer might work on. They tend submit a video proposing a project to improve their local community.

As you can imagine, we’ve been over the moon with this second award, another reflection of the work put in by our designers and developers. It also recognises the commitment by ICE to not just nurture future civil engineers, but to make every effort to gauge the impact made by its CityZen competition.

A CityZen award winner in 2021, who now studies civil engineering, said that “[ICE CityZen] gave me my first insight into civil engineering [and] I found collaborating with friends on the game really fun.”

And students who won in 2022 said that “it brought engineering to life and encouraged us to think differently about the problems which engineers have to solve.”

You can read more from ICE on the award win.

And you can register to learn more about the 2024 CityZen award too.