Made by Many has been working with Skype and Microsoft on Skype in the classroom for the last four years and these awards were a great opportunity to be able to tell the story of the whole project, especially as we had just handed it back to Microsoft.

The project had started with a PR brief, but we were able to spend time researching what teachers were already doing with Skype and the problems they faced in connecting with each other.

This gave us the chance to create a service that was truly useful, building on existing behaviours to make it easier for teachers to bring incredible guest speakers to their students and collaborate with other classrooms.

It's amazing to have watched Skype in the classroom grow from a simple sign up page to a community of more than 100,000 teachers, and incredibly gratifying to see the IxDA judges recognising how we built the service, understanding our approach and the impact it has helped Skype to achieve in classrooms around the world.

Nearly everyone at Made by Many (at least 31 of us!) has worked on this project at some point over the last few years, and the story of how it started, and how we continued to innovate and develop the service throughout that time, in partnership with our clients at Skype, is something we're incredibly proud of. So a massive thank you to IxDA for recognising the project with this award.

Meanwhile, our own project Hackaball, was a finalist in the Engaging category.

Exciting things are on the horizon for our expressive, programmable ball as the team prepare to launch a Kickstarter campaign. I'm sure they'll be telling you all about it in more detail soon, but for now, you can find out more about it at hackaball.com and follow its progress on Twitter and Instagram.