The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media are collaborating once again on the National STEM Video Game Challenge, which aims to motivate interest in science, technology, engineering and math through the power of gaming.

The second-annual initiative is now accepting submissions of original video game concepts and designs from students and educators. The challenge is open to US middle school, high school and college students as well as to professional educators.

New categories to this year’s challenge are the PBS Kids stream and the Sesame Street stream. The former invites entrants to design math-based video games for children in pre-K through grade four that are inspired by the Ready To Learn Initiative’s math curriculum framework. The Sesame Street stream, meanwhile, is open only to the collegiate and educator categories and calls for entrants to design a STEM-based learning video game for pre-K through first grade inspired by Sesame Street‘s curriculum and footage.

The middle school and high school winners will each receive AMD-based laptops, game design software packages and other tools to support their skill development. Each winner’s youth sponsoring organization will receive cash prizes and educational software (there will be a total of US$80,000 in prizes for youth and youth-sponsoring organizations). A prize pool of US$30,000 will be awarded to the collegiate winners and a prize pool of US$40,000 to winners in the educator Category.

Entries will be accepted until March 12, 2012 at www.stemchallenge.org.