Distinguished guests, colleagues and friends,  

Tonight, we get to celebrate something truly rare: a person who hasn’t just studied the future of learning—but has actually built a bridge to this future.  

It is my great pleasure to introduce our 2025 Yidan Prize for Education Research Laureate, Professor Uri Wilensky.  

And let me step for a moment into the world he helped us imagine: a world where every learner can read and write the language of complexity. 

Complexity is no longer a specialist’s problem. It’s everyone’s challenge. One day the financial markets fall off a cliff, then they spring back for reasons no one fully agrees. We track humidity, wind speed and temperature, and still get drenched in a rainstorm that wasn’t in the forecast. That’s not failure. That’s complexity. It’s the world we inhabit—messy, nonlinear, full of emergent surprises. 

But in school learning still often follows a straight line: here’s the question, here’s the method, here’s the answer—one cause, one effect. And that—exactly that—is the world that Uri challenges. 

Uri pioneered a new paradigm in how students and researchers engage with complexity—one that replaces  

• straight lines with ecosystems,  
• and simple reactions with dynamic interactions.  

His research invites learners to play with complexity, to wrestle with it, to see its hidden patterns and beauty—and to emerge confident navigating the big scientific and social questions of our time. 

And the engine behind this revolution? NetLogo. 

Now, NetLogo is deceptively simple. In Uri’s modeling environment, individual “agents”—they could be cars, molecules, or people—follow rules that students can set. But then something magical happens: those simple rules combine into complex patterns that surprise even the model’s creators.  

Uri once described a class modeling highway traffic. Students programmed cars to speed up when the road ahead was free and slow down when another car got too close. Straightforward, right? But the model didn’t give them smooth traffic. It produced shockwaves of traffic jams that traveled backward all the way down the highway. Suddenly, students weren’t just learning about traffic flow; they were discovering behavior that no textbook diagram could have captured. That’s the kind of spark that turns learning into understanding. 

Uri’s insight is both elegant and profound: new representations create new ways of thinking. Have you tried dividing Roman numerals—good luck! But move from Roman to Arabic numerals and suddenly you unlock algebra, calculus, modern science. That shift in representation changed what human beings could conceive. In the same way, Uri’s world of agent-based modeling opens up fresh pathways for understanding ecosystems. 

And let me tell you why this matters—right now, in this moment. 

We are all wrestling with the rise of artificial intelligence. It is tempting—far too tempting—to see AI as a force that steadily erodes human agency. But this must not become a slow human retreat, us trading more and more autonomy for convenience.  Education shouldn’t train people to perform isolated tasks that machines will eventually automate. Instead, we should put the focus on capabilities that cannot be automated—our ability to navigate complexity, to exercise judgment amid uncertainty, to engage with systems that don’t have simple answers. Uri’s work doesn’t just fit into that world. It builds that world. 

And behind of all that is a remarkable person. Uri’s generosity, his sense of public service, his deep commitment to the next generation of researchers—these are rare treasures in academia. Uri didn’t build NetLogo to keep it in a lab. He made it free. Open source. A global public good. You can see his fingerprints in countless classrooms and research labs around the world, including here in Hong Kong. 

And on a personal note: no matter how busy he is, Uri always makes space. He listens. He advises. He answers that extra email. He shows up with a brilliant mind and a human heart—every time. 

So tonight, we honor much more than a career. We honor a vision for democratizing computational thinking for every learner, everywhere—a vision that captures the very spirit of the Yidan Prize. 

Uri, it is my great honor to congratulate you on becoming the 2025 Yidan Prize for Education Research Laureate. 

——
Andreas Schleicher 
Head, Judging Panel, Yidan Prize for Education Research;
Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills, OECD