On February 4^th, our partner company Edheads.org continued its streak of success by winning the TechColumbus award for Innovation in Non-Profit Service Delivery.  The award was a surprise to Gail Wheatley, Executive Director.  “TechColumbus is known as one of the top 10 innovation incubators in the country, so, while we were hopeful, we certainly didn’t think we had this one locked.  There was a lot of outstanding competition, including the number one science center in the country, COSI, and the number one library system in the country, the Columbus Metropolitan Library,” said Wheatley. 

 Edheads has previously won major national awards such as the Flash Forward Award for Best Educational Content, and the Communication Arts Interactive Design Competition.  Edheads also successfully competed against international competition to win the American Association of Museum’s Gold MUSE Award, in conjunction with COSI, for best science education project.

 Edheads develops online educational games and simulations to help K-12 students understand difficult concepts and explore careers.   Over 12 million people annually (and over 100 million total since 2000) use the free service to learn the role of surgeons, engineers, weather forecasters, or crash scene investigators.  In order to produce the activities, Edheads partners with many organizations, such as Cardinal Orthopedic and Mount Carmel East Hospital, the Ohio State Highway Patrol, the Ohio State University Medical Center and OSU College of Engineering. Partnering organizations help research and test the activities to insure their accuracy.

 In addition to winning the TechColumbus Award, Wheatley will soon be leaving her long-time position as Director of Electronic Education at COSI and will be assuming a full time position with Edheads. “This is the best of all possible worlds for me, says Wheatley.  “I get paid to learn about other people’s careers in ways most people only dream about.  I go into operating rooms and witness brain surgery up close, or I can explore an engineering lab at OSU and find how they create nanoparticles.  Then I get to share all that knowledge with students across the country, hopefully interesting them in science, math, engineering and technology along the way.  And I can’t express how grateful I am that the idea has really taken off and that now I get to do this full time!”

To experience Edheads’ free online games, visit http://www.edheads.org/ to be a surgeon, weather forecaster, crash scene investigator, engineer, and more.