Dörte Wörner Award for Innovation 2025

A young start-up team from Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (h_da) has received the Dörte Wörner Prize Award for Innovation: The award is endowed with 10,000 euros and was presented to the company GoExam by Dörte Wörner, member of the board of the Controlware Foundation, and computer science professor Markus Döhring (h_da) during the graduation ceremony of the Faculty of Computer Science on 5 December 2025. The start-up was founded in 2023 by students Darius Dinger (h_da) and Tobias Combé (TU Darmstadt), supported by business student Fiona Woköck and computer science professor Michael von Rüden (both h_da).

GoExam offers services for teachers at universities and schools: the start-up helps them to create exams more quickly and efficiently. To this end, the young company provides a pool of tasks from which lecturers can compile exams using drag & drop. Automatically prepared exam layouts are available for this purpose, along with sample solutions and an interactive AI-supported chat for creating new tasks.

‘We believe that teachers spend too much time creating exams,’ the founding team explains their motivation. ‘We want to give them more time for what's important: teaching – and their students.’ The aim is to simplify the time-consuming process of designing and compiling exams with a tool that is intuitive to use. The founders emphasise that it's not just about saving time, but also about quality and fairness in exams.

Young entrepreneur Darius Dinger completed his master's degree in computer science at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and already worked intensively on the digitisation of the education sector during his studies. With his expertise in the development of microservices in both front-end and back-end, he is responsible for the technical implementation and further development of GoExam. Tobias Combé studied electrical engineering and information technology at TU Darmstadt and has more than ten years of experience in software development and product management. He brings experience in technology, product development, marketing and IT security to the start-up.

Fiona Woköck is studying for a master's degree in business administration with a focus on marketing at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and has extensive practical experience in sales and customer consulting. At GoExam, she is responsible for marketing and communication, develops brand strategies, manages social media and supports market and target group analyses. Michael von Rüden is Professor of Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing at h_da. Through his teaching activities and close cooperation with students, he was involved in the development of GoExam from the very beginning and has supported the project ever since.

The Dörte Wörner Prize is awarded once a year to IT students in dual or cooperative degree programmes at h_da, the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Stuttgart and the Berlin School of Economics and Law. ‘We want to encourage young people, and especially those who are advancing their education, to take control of their lives,’ emphasises Dörte Wörner, the prize's namesake and chair of the foundation. ‘You can achieve anything.’ With this attitude to life, her husband, company founder Helmut Wörner, worked his way up from baker's apprentice to honorary senator of h_da. The team awarded the Dörte Wörner Prize takes this encouragement seriously:

‘We are very grateful for this support. The funding gives us an important boost, opens up new opportunities for the further development of GoExam and helps us to implement innovative new features and achieve long-term success.’