The Sixth National Teaching Achievement Award for Higher education has recently been announced. According to the official document from Ministry of Education, a total of 651 projects won the prizes, including 2 special awards, 64 first prizes and 585 second prizes. Tsinghua University won 3 first prizes and 9 second prizes as First Participant. Among these prizes, the project “Innovative Practice Education- Cultivating Innovative Talents Based on the High- level Discipline Construction System”, in which Professor Andrew Yao was involved, won the first prize.

The project was initiated by Professor Binglin Gu, President of Tsinghua University. Four famous scholars of different fields, Professor Dazhong Wang, Professor Jingsong Wang, Professor Haoming Chen and Professor Andrew Yao, have participated in this project. The results are based on frontier teaching, putting forward new ideas and new solutions to the existing problems of current teaching situation. Generally speaking, the project results reflect the progress Tsinghua University has made in innovative education.

The National Teaching Achievement Award for Higher Education is a state-level award, set up by the State Council. Through this prize, we can find substantial official support for the cultivating system of ITCS. Ever since the Computer Science Experimental Class of Tsinghua University was established, Professor Yao has designed a collection of special courses by himself, intending to train first-rate student and scholars; Followed the establishment of ITCS, Professor Yao sets up and leads the chair professor team, which involves 20 world-famous scholars; He also selects excellent undergraduate students from first and second grades for pre-research study. All these efforts are consistent with that of Tsinghua University, with the same aim of innovating the educational system and building the “World-Class University”.