Education Technology (EdTech) Awards

Worldwide innovation awards

Celebrating the leaders in education technology

Leonardo da Vinci described himself as a man without formal letters, and he spent his life closing that gap on his own terms. His notebooks are, among other things, a record of a learner at work. They contain lists of people to seek out and what to ask each of them: a mathematician to explain how to square a triangle, a physician to discuss the movement of the heart, an engineer to show him how a mechanism was built. A surviving inventory of his library runs to well over a hundred volumes, a serious collection for a man working before the age of mass printing. He taught himself Latin well into adulthood because the texts he needed were written in it, and he studied geometry in his forties alongside the mathematician Luca Pacioli.

He also understood that learning was a design problem. He tested ideas by drawing them, redrew them when they failed, and arranged his notes so that one observation led to the next. After his death, his pupil Francesco Melzi gathered the scattered writings on painting into a single instructional work, which became a teaching text for generations of artists. Leonardo’s real subject was never just painting or anatomy or hydraulics. It was how a person moves from not knowing to knowing, and what makes that movement faster, deeper and more durable.

Education technology takes up the same question at global scale. The DaVinci Awards® EdTech category recognizes the organizations building the tools, platforms and experiences that help people learn, whether in a classroom, a workplace, a living room or a village with a single shared device.

Download Entry Form

Worldwide innovation awards

how have you excelled?

Education technology has moved well past the first wave of digitized textbooks and video lectures. Adaptive learning engines now adjust difficulty, pacing and content to the individual learner in real time. AI tutors and teaching assistants offer one-to-one support at a scale no school system could staff. Assessment tools are shifting from the high-stakes final exam toward continuous, formative feedback. Immersive simulations let learners practice surgery, welding or public speaking in environments that are safe to fail in. And the line between formal education and workforce learning keeps blurring, as people retrain across longer careers and employers become educators in their own right.

The DaVinci Awards® recognizes the full breadth of this innovation. At the experience level: the learning platforms, apps and content tools that learners and teachers actually touch. At the intelligence level: the adaptive systems, analytics and AI models that personalize instruction and show educators what is working. At the infrastructure level: the administration, credentialing, accessibility and integration technologies that let learning products function reliably inside real institutions. And at the access level: the products extending quality education to learners who have been underserved by traditional systems, whether through language, disability, geography, connectivity or cost.

Entries are welcomed from K-12, higher education, early childhood, corporate learning and lifelong learning products, from startups introducing genuinely new approaches to established platforms deploying new capabilities, and from specialist tools solving one important problem exceptionally well, such as dyslexia support, early literacy, exam integrity or lab simulation.

If your product helps people learn more effectively, more equitably or more joyfully, a DaVinci Award® could be yours.

Worldwide innovation awards

Areas of Interest

The DaVinci Awards recognizes outstanding feats of human ingenuity, and product innovation. Entries are welcomed from individuals, teams, startups, or established enterprises based anywhere in the world. AreaThe DaVinci Awards® recognizes outstanding feats of human ingenuity and product innovation in education technology. Entries are welcomed from individuals, teams, startups and established enterprises based anywhere in the world. Areas of interest include, but are certainly not limited to:s of interest include, but are certainly not limited to:

Adaptive & Personalized Learning: Adaptive learning engines and intelligent tutoring systems | Personalized learning path and mastery-based progression platforms | Microlearning and spaced repetition tools | AI tutors and conversational learning assistants | Learning analytics identifying knowledge gaps in real time
K-12 Classroom Technology: Interactive instruction, lesson planning and classroom management platforms | Digital curriculum and assignment workflow tools | Student engagement and formative assessment technology | Parent-teacher communication and family engagement platforms | Learning tools for STEM, literacy, numeracy and languages
Higher Education & Academic Technology: Learning management systems and virtual learning environments | Virtual labs, simulations and remote experimentation platforms | Student success, retention and advising technology | Online and hybrid degree delivery platforms | Academic integrity, proctoring and authentic assessment tools
Corporate Learning & Workforce Upskilling: Enterprise learning experience platforms | Skills training and certification technology | Leadership and soft-skills development tools | Compliance and safety training delivery platforms | Learning in the flow of work and performance support
Early Childhood & Foundational Learning: Early literacy and numeracy products | Play-based and screen-light learning technology | Developmental screening and early intervention tools | Language acquisition apps for young learners | Learning toys and connected educational hardware
Language Learning & Communication: Language learning apps and speech-practice platforms | AI conversation partners and pronunciation feedback | Real-time translation and multilingual classroom tools | Reading and writing support for multilingual learners | Cultural and communication skills training
Assessment, Credentialing & Skills Verification: Digital assessment, adaptive testing and automated feedback | Digital credentials, badges and verifiable learning records | Competency-based assessment platforms | Exam security and identity verification | Skills portfolios and learner-owned records
Immersive, Simulation & Experiential Learning: Virtual and augmented reality learning environments | Vocational and technical skills simulators | Medical, aviation and industrial training simulations | Game-based learning and gamified instruction | Digital twins and virtual labs for hands-on practice
Accessibility & Inclusive Learning: Tools supporting learners with dyslexia, ADHD, visual or hearing impairments | Assistive reading, captioning and speech-to-text technology | Universal design for learning platforms | Low-bandwidth and offline-first learning products | Learning technology for refugee, rural and underserved communities
Education Operations, Infrastructure & Data: Student information systems and school administration platforms | Interoperability, identity and learning data infrastructure | Student data privacy, security and consent management | Admissions, enrollment and financial aid technology | Tutoring marketplaces and teacher recruitment platforms

Impress the judges

Ingenuity of Approach

Education technology sits at the intersection of learning science, software engineering, product design and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. The DaVinci Awards® panel assesses submissions across that full breadth. Show the thinking behind your innovation: what learning problem was addressed, why existing tools left it unsolved, and what pedagogical, technical or design decisions produced your approach. The most compelling entries are grounded in how people actually learn, not merely in what technology can do: a product built around retrieval practice, feedback timing or cognitive load will stand apart from one that simply moves a worksheet onto a screen. Entries that demonstrate a distinctive, well-reasoned theory of why learning fails, and how their product changes that outcome, will score most strongly on this criterion. The panel is particularly attentive to AI-powered claims, which are now widespread: submissions that show measurable improvement in learning, rather than engagement with the AI itself, will be assessed most favorably.

Impress the judges

The Problem Solved

Education technology exists to help people learn, and the DaVinci Awards® assesses it on that basis. Clearly explain the learning challenge your product addresses, the learners and educators it serves, and the measurable improvement it delivers. Evidence of learning outcomes carries far more weight than usage statistics: gains in assessment results, reading levels, course completion, skills acquired, time to competency or equivalent measures appropriate to your product. Independent evaluations, controlled studies and results from real classrooms or workplaces are especially valued, and the panel looks favorably on candor about where a product works best and where it does not. Judges are also attentive to equity: a product that benefits only well-resourced learners, or that works well for the average student while failing those who struggle, delivers less than its headline results suggest. Where your product handles learner data, particularly for children, address privacy, security and consent directly, including how you meet obligations such as FERPA, COPPA or GDPR, rather than treating them as compliance footnotes.

Impress the judges

Scalability & Legacy

Education markets are fragmented, relationship-driven and slow to adopt, which makes scaling an education product a distinctive challenge. Describe your current deployment scope: a single classroom or campus, a district or institution, a national system or a global platform. Explain how your product handles localization, whether language, curriculum alignment, regulatory requirements or cultural context, and how it fits into the existing systems, workflows and procurement realities of the institutions it serves. For adaptive and AI-driven platforms, describe the data behind your models and how performance has been validated across different learner populations and settings. The DaVinci Awards® is most interested in education technology innovations with durable influence: the learning model that becomes the standard way a subject is taught, the assessment approach that changes what educators measure, or the access technology that permanently widens who gets to learn.