In Season 4, we participated in the Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which is an international competition that asks students to make a 5-minute video about an interesting topic about the life sciences, physics, or math. The winner receives a $250,000 scholarship, $50,000 for his or her teacher/mentor, and $100,000 for a Breakthrough science lab at his or her school as well as a trip to the award ceremony to receive the prizes. The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. The Breakthrough Challenge is also partnered with Khan Academy, National Geographic Network, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
The Challenge is limited to students ages 13-18 who fill out a short application including their video, uploaded to YouTube. Video submissions were due October 10, after which each applicant was required to peer review five other submissions by October 16, and the winner will be announced at the televised award ceremony on December 4, 2016.
Since we are AP Biology students, we focused our videos on topics about life science, including the science behind laughter, lack of sleep, and the spread of viruses. We started by making storyboards with the visual and audio aspects of our videos. Storyboards are important because they helped us plan what we needed to say and how we were going to emphasize our ideas with our visuals. Storyboards also helped speed up the filming process because we already had all of our ideas planned out on paper. We shared our storyboards with one another through Google Drive to receive feedback and then began creating! Some Rockstars wrote detailed scripts next and others jumped right into filming. Each 2nd and 6th block for Season 4 was dedicated to working on our videos. We shared our progress on October 7, to give final feedback before we all dispersed for the weekend to make final touches and submit our Challenges videos on the evening of October 10. This season ended with the 5 peer-to peer reviews each student had to complete before October 16 to be qualified in the competition which we all had time to complete in class!
 |
| Helen is researching. |
 |
| Michelle is drafting a script. |
 |
| Michelle is filming in stop motion. |
 |
| Natalie is reviewing her Storyboard while filming. |
Great round up! The challenge was super fun!
ReplyDeleteI love the captions on these photos! I also like that the description of what we did was not super long, so it held my attention!
ReplyDeleteloved your post! This was such a fun challenge to participate in! Can't wait to see the results of who wins!
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI like how you went into detail about the process of the Breakthrough Challenge and all the steps we went through to complete our videos. Great post!
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I liked how concise it was. The photos are great and I like the captions.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I liked how concise it was. The photos are great and I like the captions.
ReplyDeleteI loved the images that went along with your post. Made it really easy to understand and visual!
ReplyDeleteThis was a challenging but fun season. The BTC video was really hard to make but it taught me a lot about hard work and dedication!
ReplyDeleteLoved the pictures! Got to see how everyone in the class did such diverse topics! Also good overall summary of the season, including in class work days.
ReplyDeleteI really loved the images you provided and that you added captions to them!
ReplyDeleteAwesome round up! I love how you explain the Breakthrough Challenge then follow that up with pictures of us actually working on our ideas and challenges!
ReplyDeleteSuch a cool season! The amount of diversity in the topics shows the large variety of topics you can learn about while studying bio!
ReplyDelete