The jury had a very hard time selecting the winning entries from all the creative and technologically advanced contest submissions. Many more Story Maps than those presented here would deserve mentioning. However, we had to limit it to the most outstanding ones in each of the two age groups: (A) high school students aged 15 to 19 and (B) college/university students aged 19 to 30.
There was an equal number of votes for two submissions competing for the second place in the group of college/university students, hence there are two students who will be receiving the second price.
While there was a large number of submissions overall, only very few of them came from high school students so that only the first two ranks in this group have a name attached to them.

Congratulations to the winning submissions and a big thank you to all those who submitted their wonderful maps!
ESRI has put together a website with a collection of the winning IYGU Story Maps: Meet the winners here!

Finally, here are the first three places in each group (make sure to check out their Story Maps by clicking on the links):

A High school students aged 15 to 19

(1) Chi-Lei Lin, Kang Chiao Bilingual School, China-Taipei

Map title: Hollywood in Taiwan
Description: “This Story Map is about Taiyupian, which is also called Taiwanese-dialect films. This kind of film art played an important role in the past of Taiwan, especially from 1950s-1980s. In this Story Map Hollywood in Taiwan: The Story of Taiyupian, you will learn about the history of the development of Taiyupian. Also, with the performance of maps, the information about Taiyupian will be clearly showed to you. Hope you enjoy!”
Category: Sport/entertaining//recreating

(2) Ella Jaeger, Wentzinger Gymnasium, Germany

Map title: Wasser in Kalifornien (Water in California)
Description: „The story Map talks about the latest drought in California, how it came to be, what consequences it had and how it influenced the use of water.”
Category: Wasting/recycling//preserving

B College/university students aged 19 to 30

(1) Leng Ying Khoo, University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Map title: The Impacts
Description: “This story map depicts the daily routine of a typical American college student and how seemingly trivial decision that a person make can lead to a series of impacts.”
Category: Wasting/recycling//preserving

(2) Spencer Elford, McMaster University, Canada

Map title: Concrete Jungle: Urban Expansion and the Rise of the Megacity
Description: “We are living on an urban planet. For the first time in human history more people are living in cities than anywhere else.”
Category: Working/housing//urbanizing

(2) Karl Chastko, McMaster University, Canada

Map title: Food, Water and 7 Billion People: Improving Water Efficiency in Agriculture
Description: “Every day the average person drinks 2-4 liters of water while they effectively consume approximately 2000-5000 liters of water indirectly through the food they eat. This simple stat doesn’t tell the whole story of how water is allocated to produce food across the globe. I have created this story map using open data from the ArcGIS online living atlas predominantly, the landsat imagery service, USA crop land 2013, MODIS imagery and the imagery basemap. These data sets all come together in this story map to illustrate how decisions you make at the grocery store and market can have global implications on the global water supply!”
Category: Eating/drinking//surviving

(3) Yu-Hsiang Yang, National Taiwan University, China-Taipei

Map title: China house-buying power is rolling the world up
Description: “Along with globalization in the economic and financial area, buying real estate internationally becomes more and more common. Chinese-ethnic people pour money in the real estate market abundantly in Europe and North America, which leads to a rise in housing prices locally. The reason why this happens, it plays an important role that Chinese-ethnic society possess a deep-rooted concept of assets.”
Category: Working/housing//urbanizing