Our Award-Winning Products, 2025
- Joel Gonzalez Parra
- Jul 25
- 4 min read
Our department is delighted to be recognized by two different organizations for work completed by our expert professionals.
ACE Awards
ACE: the Association for Communication Excellence in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Life and Human Sciences, convenes annually to provide awards and feedback through the ACE Critique & Awards Program. The Critique and Awards Program is geared toward providing members with professional critiques of their work and recognizing those who have done an outstanding job, providing awards in 11 categories, ranging from writing to media and design.
We are delighted to share our products’ six awards for the year 2025 (3 gold awards, 2 silver awards, and 1 bronze), making this one of our high award-winning years! Let’s take a look at our winners!
Produce TRAINer
Category and Class: Education Technology and Design 3 Innovative Use of Instructional Technology in Education
Gold, Outstanding Professional Skill Award
Produce TRAINer is a food safety training toolkit for produce farm workers to learn and practice risk assessment on the farm. It includes an introductory module and three interactive lessons, as well as trainer resources. Lessons take from 5 to 20 minutes each and are available in both Spanish and English. Produce TRAINer was awarded the Outstanding Professional Skill or “best in category” award, chosen from among the gold winners in Education Technology and Design.
Resources are freely available for use at ProduceTRAINer.com
Night of the Living Debt
Category and Class: Graphic Design 4 | Interactive Multimedia/Web Graphics
Gold
Recognizing the importance of financial literacy for youth, Extension and educational systems can use this valuable game to help youth understand credit score and debt. Night of the Living Debt provides post-apocalyptic gameplay that builds financial literacy among young adults, helping them understand what types of actions support or harm their score.
“I played several rounds and even as an adult with a high credit score, I felt stressed by the zombies over whether I was making the correct decisions. Excellent way to engage kids and help them learn at the same time.”
– Kevin DiBenedetto, ACE Awards Judge.
The web version of the game was produced in 2024 by the New Mexico State University’s Learning Games Lab, with support from the Extension Foundation's New Technologies in Agricultural Extension, in partnership with University of Idaho Extension. The original iPad version of the game was produced in 2016 with support from CoBank.
Play now at Night of the Living Debt
Dr. Eugene's BioTech Lab - 4-H Biotechnology Games
Category and Class: Marketing 1 Marketing Communications Campaign with a budget of $0-1000
Gold
University of Connecticut Extension and biotechnology experts collaborated with the Learning Games Lab at New Mexico State University to create Dr. Eugene's Biotech Lab. In this game, the player is a new intern at a biotech lab, learning the principles and research to enhance food production under new environments. This award recognized the social media campaign for the game:
“This was a neat campaign. I like both its various distribution channels and the low cost of distribution. [...] The entire campaign seemed strategic and well thought out. You had achievable goals and were able to deliver by varying your platforms. Great job!”
– Jason Kosovski, ACE Awards Judge.
Play now at 4-H Biotech Games
iTIPS Food Safety
Category and Class: Education Technology and Design 3 Innovative Use of Instructional Technology in Education
Silver
The iTIPS multi-state project included collaborators from Iowa, Massachusetts, and New Mexico, sharing expertise of food safety educators and researchers Nancy Flores (New Mexico State University), Shannon Coleman (Iowa State University) and Amanda Kinchla (University of Massachusetts). Designed to be accessible and freely available online in English and Spanish, the modules enable more robust access to Good Manufacturing Practices training tools for underserved communities and small facilities with limited resources to help improve food safety practices and regulatory compliance.
Try it now at iTIPS - Food Safety
Supply Chain Options for Sustainable Southwest Beef
Category and Class: Electronic Media, Video, & Audio 3 Motion Graphics/Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality/Animation
Silver
The informative Supply Chain Options animation was created by the Department of Innovative Media Research and Extension for the Southwest Sustainable Beef Project. It communicates environmental footprints and production costs of three supply chain options for beef cattle from the Southwestern United States. These numbers are based on a modeled scenario with Black Angus cattle as well as opportunities for incorporating heritage breed Rarámuri Criollo cattle from the Copper Canyon in Mexico into Southwest beef cattle operations.
Dr. Eugene's BioTech Lab - 4-H Biotechnology Games
Category and Class: Graphic Design 4 Interactive Multimedia/Web Graphics
Bronze
Dr. Eugene is back in the award list! This time is for its graphic design:
“The animation style and graphics are well designed. The characters are high quality, and overall the game is very engaging. The video explainer at the beginning of the video is quite informative and sets up the user to functionally understand what they are trying to accomplish in the game. Thorough achievement levels to play multiple different roles/functions in a bio lab.”
– Kevin DiBenedetto.
Play now at 4-H Biotech Games
Gee! Awards
Our most recent game, Cozy River Valley, is now a Gee! Award Finalist. The Gee! Award recognizes excellence in educational game design, judged by international leaders in the field. If you would like to vote for Cozy River Valley, you can do so through the following link: 2025 Gee Learning Games Award. Winners will be announced on August 21.
Written by Joel Gonzalez Parra, Multimedia Specialist, Department of Innovative Media Research and Extension.
