On October 9, about 90 Year 7-9 students from Mountain Creek State High School (on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast) took part in an Adobe 1-minute Video Challenge aimed at promoting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Besides promoting the UN SDGs, this type of event also aims to enhance students video literacy, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem solving and creativity skills. All recognised internationally as vital to thrive in the future.

Usually I would be running this event face-to-face with the teachers and students for the day as an incursion. Due to COVID, I’ve been connecting online, but for this event there were connection issues so I pre-recorded my introductions and aims and let the teachers run the event without my direct support.

After being reminded about each of the UN SDGs, the students broke into small production teams and decided which goal they would be promoting in their 1 minute video. Then they were given time to plan their story, film their content as well as gather extra assets (such as royalty free still & moving images as well as audio files) and then put the story together with Adobe Premier Rush.

Premier Rush is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud set of applications that are now widely available throughout Queensland Government, Independent, Catholic and Lutheran schools.

Premier rush is a cut down version of the more professional Adobe Premiere Pro video editing solution. It is very popular with students and teachers because of its simplicity, its accessibility on mobile and desktop devices and its power to produce amazing video stories. It’s not as simple as Adobe Spark Video but it doesn’t require anywhere near the learning curve of Premiere Pro.

Most of the students were new to video production and film-making so they recruited the help of one of the school’s media teachers. The students worked very well in their teams and collectively produced 18 different video stories.

Here are the top three winning films that were produced by these talented students based on my judgement and a peer assessment process …

3^rd Place – Team 12 (Climate Change by James, Rowan, Ayran, Jack & Aaron)

2^nd Place – Team 13 (Plastic’s Journey by Jess, Evie, Maisie, Sarah & Charlize)

1^st – Team 3 (The Weight of the World by Biance, Eva, Khushbu, Sarah & Elena)

I would like to congratulate all the students involved in this 1 Min Video Challenge and thank Mr Graeme Breen, Head Of Digital Innovation at Mountain Creek State High School for organising this event and providing this opportunity for his students.

Note that parent release forms were signed by all identifiable students.