The 2025 Yidan Prize has been awarded to Mamadou Amadou Ly and Professor Uri Wilensky for their work in education development and research. Ly promotes multilingual education in Senegal, while Wilensky advances computational thinking through his NetLogo platform. Their innovations aim to equip learners with skills for a rapidly changing world.
The Yidan Prize, established in 2016, is an annual award that honors changemakers whose action-driven research and evidence-based practices improve education worldwide. The 2025 laureates, Mamadou Amadou Ly and Professor Uri Wilensky, tackle education from distinct angles: Ly through multilingualism and Wilensky via computational thinking.
In Senegal, formal schooling is in French, spoken fluently by only about 20 percent of the population. Ly, executive director of the non-profit Associates in Research and Education for Development (Ared), addresses this barrier. “Our bilingual education model starts with learning in the national language, that is, the languages children speak at home and in the streets,” Ly says. “French is introduced gradually and this ensures better understanding for these children of what they are learning.” Teachers are trained for interactive classrooms beyond rote learning, yielding a 134 percent increase in word reading compared to monolingual peers. Partnering with Senegal’s Ministry of Education, Ared has scaled nationally and aided neighboring countries, promoting equitable multilingual education for millions.
Wilensky, Lorraine H. Morton Professor of Learning Sciences, Computer Science, and Complex Systems at Northwestern University in the United States, fosters computational literacy to help students understand complex systems. “In traditional instruction, a teacher gives information to the students and they learn the results of the scientific process,” Wilensky says. “But our world is changing very rapidly, and what’s more important is the skill of being able to adapt, create, reason about and model the new situations that we’re in.” His NetLogo platform enables visualization and testing of phenomena like disease outbreaks and economic dynamics, encouraging discovery through experimentation.
As 2025 Yidan Prize laureates for education development and research, respectively, each receives HK$15 million (US$1.9 million) in cash and HK$15 million in project funding to expand their impact. They engaged in the Yidan Prize Summit in Hong Kong and received gold medals at the December 6 award ceremony, capping a week of education events.
