Fredericton-based Blue Spurs announced last week it was a winner in the 2017 AWS City on a Cloud Innovation Challenge for its Blue Kit “Internet of Things starter kit”.

On Thursday at a ceremony in Washington D.C., Amazon Web Services recognized 19 organizations from around the world for its City on a Cloud competition. The event aims to recognize how local and regional governments are innovating on behalf of citizens around the globe using the AWS Cloud.

There were three categories– Best Practices, Dream Big, and Partners in Innovation – and Blue Spurs  was one of five winners in the Partners in Innovation Category.

Blue Spurs, a cloud computing consultancy that employs almost 100 people, entered Blue Kit in the competition, which it developed in collaboration with CyberNB and the New Brunswick government. Blue Kit is a low-code IoT educational starter kit that allows middle and high school students to understand the fundamentals of IoT.

Using technology that complex IoT systems are built on today, including arduino boards, sensors, AWS IoT and Noodl, students build IoT projects to learn the fundamentals in an interactive, fun environment. Each project builds on the previous one, providing increasing challenges that are aligned with school curriculum objectives.

Students can create projects to control an LED light with voice commands through Amazon Lex voice services, for example. These are the same technologies powering state of the art IoT applications in many industries today. The Blue Kit made them easily accessible in a classroom lab environment by all students.

“The Partners in Innovation award recognizes a technology partner that has deployed an innovative solution to solve a government or teaching and learning challenge,” said a post on the Blue Spurs website last week by CEO Mike LeBlanc. “Given the fact that this year's challenge saw a record number of applications from over 15 countries, we are truly honoured to be among the selected winners.”