You have content experts (or at least content enthusiasts). You have a medium that reaches a high volume of audiences and also has a very low barrier to entry. Add a little competition and enticing prizes, and your outcome should be some awesome, crowdsourced videos that showcase science, technology, engineering, and math in a compelling, authentic way. Right?
(Winner of the National Academy of Engineering's Global Grand Challenges Video Contest, 2013)
(via) The problem with this video, and so many winners of similar video contests, is that it doesn't actually accomplish what the ultimate goal of contests like this is: to inspire an interest in science/tech/engineering/math among an audience who might not be interested. (I presume.) The video creator is already an engineering major in college, and it's hard to imagine kids really being converted one way or another about STEM after watching this video. Though it does have many good qualities, I'd argue that its failure to reach potential was largely due to how the contest itself was set up.
A recipe for less-than-optimal contest results
Incredibly broad visions "1-2 minute video showing engineering’s impact on society in the last 50 years and to project its contributions in the next 50 years" (similar traps: "Make science cool")
Pulling off expected product requires participants to adopt an unreasonably large and new skill set ("A 13-year-old can go viral on YouTube - should be pretty easy for someone who understands rocket science."). 2b) Little support or guidance on product expectations/how to achieve results ("We'll let them come up with something... and that something is undefined!").
No one judging who is familiar with or good at making the product trying to be achieved.
Viewing video as a free ticket to engagement and outreach (and being "hip and cool").
Incredibly broad vision is something a lot of folks (including myself and K12 Videos, very much so) are suckers for. MIT's SciEx Competition, a video contest that called for "extreme science videos" that made science cool, suffered from this during its first iteration last year, which led to a very mixed bag of entries that were, for the most part, not... uh (well, I'll say it)... very good (though some were very, very close). Now, to their credit, the organizers are very aware of this and were extremely keen on revamping the vision to get entries that better matched their overall goal, which is to inspire more kids to consider learning about STEM fields. More on that at the end.
Another issue with broad vision and expectations is that it often leads to vague, grandiose, sentimental entries that don't really have much substance but also don't have the production value to pull of inspiration. That's the issue with this $25,000 winning video (and pretty much every winning video) for the National Academy of Engineering:
Here is inspirational pulled off well (IMHO):
This GE ad (and pretty much all of GE's videos) is awesome - not necessarily more substantive content-wise, but certainly aesthetic-wise. The only catch? It's made by professionals. (Because that's the job of a professional. To make professional videos.)
And this points to a greater problem of a lack of digital media literacy - understanding what goes into making good digital media products and the self-awareness to know what you can and can't pull off - among technical communities. I say this as someone who was trained as an engineer and then learned how to produce media - production is hard and requires a different mindset to do well. That doesn't mean that people should be discouraged from doing inspirational videos - what it's really about is identifying what is feasible to best leverage content knowledge and excitement.
You don't have to make science cool by trying to copy "extreme" or super high production-value videos - you just need to... not get in the way of it already being cool. (Unless you are good at making those kinds of videos, then by all means - do an extreme science video. The point is, there's lower-hanging fruit that can be just as compelling.)
If your intended participant pool has to pick up some intense skills (pre-production, scripting, shooting, post-production) in order to marginally achieve the goal, rethink the goal, unless you can really, really equip people with the skills necessary to pull that off.
Two examples of what I deem "successes:"
Harvard Medical School's Organ Challenge
Why it works:
Tight, simple, clear call-to-action - make a music video/song about the human body. As a result, these videos also succeeded in making physiology fun.
Call-to-action is totally attainable! Doesn't matter if you don't really know how to film or edit - all of the winners achieve the call-to-action completely.
Regardless of the product outcomes, the participants probably had a lot of fun and got to learn something new in the process of making these videos. In general, that's why I don't have as much beef with video contests aimed for younger participants.
The organizers themselves are "experts" in the product - this was organized by the HMS students who made the "What Does The Spleen Say" video. They knew what to look for and had clear expectations for participants. (This is actually a super salient point - you see a lot of engineers judging these contests, or documentary-makers, but no one who's made entertaining, educational video. It's partially because there just aren't a lot of people in the edu-tain-spiration field in the first place. )
GE's 6 Second Science Fair
It's not really a contest, and it's arguably not really video (?), and the videos are demos which isn't exactly science... BUT:
Very tight format and expectation.
Product goal is very easily attainable (although even within Vine, there's a spectrum of quality).
It got people experimenting and being curious about science, and gained some media traction (and subsequently more engagement).
As far as the whole issue of judging goes (the idea of making things a social media contest of 'Likes' could constitute its own post), I'll leave you with this co-winner of Change the Equation's S.T.E.M. is Cool Video Contest from 2010. This was a contest to get STEM corporations to make videos to get kids interested in STEM careers.
I'm trying to be as civil and understanding as I can be here, but this. THIS. THIS WAS MADE IN 2010. BY A COMPANY. TO GET KIDS TO THINK STEM IS COOL. COOL. AND THEN OTHER ADULTS THOUGHT IT WAS COOL.
(via) (As a side note, I find the way it handles/simplifies the gender disparity and lack of diversity in STEM incredibly problematic. This video evokes a lot of mixed feelings from me, ranging from deep sadness to incapacitation from laughing to utter denial that such a heinous and out-of-touch thing could exist.)
Video is not a free ticket to engagement. Video itself is not inherently cool, unless we're living in 1890s Germany where moving pictures are being made for the first time. Then, I guess the novelty of a moving picture is inherently cool. But there are lots of ways to get people fascinated about science (look at the popularity of IFL Science on Facebook, science gifs, infographics). As Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec said,
(via)
Back to the SciEx Competition. The whole point of this hubbub is that K12 Videos is sponsoring SciEx this year. The reasons why are:
The organizers had clear and genuine motivation. They're two grad students at MIT who study computer science, and they love what they do and want to share that with kids. No PR gimmick, no engagement quota. No one's making them do this. They're pretty awesome.
They came fully aware of the issues from last year and wanted to figure out how to improve things and were willing to completely rethink the contest. So we had several discussions about it, and came to a conclusion. Granted, this conclusion came pretty late (after they'd done their first round of advertisement and workshop sessions), but I'm leading a workshop tonight and hoping that the revised message gets through to at least some people. The key conclusion involved making much clearer entry expectations (make the videos much shorter, stop advertising it as an "extreme science video" competition, but one to make science go viral, having clearer examples, etc.).
I found the whole meetup idea (where they bring together film students, engineering students, musicians, to form teams) interesting and a step in the right direction.
Last year's videos got pretty close to achieving their last year's goal (second place winner was the best one, IMHO, but needed to be way, way, WAY shorter).
It's not going to be perfect, but I do think it'll be better than what it was before, and will be a useful case study itself.
