Announcing the Winner of our Girls Code 4 Climate @EDU Award

Vidcode is excited to announce the winners of the Girls Code 4 Climate @EDU Award! Created in partnership with Millennium@EDU Sustainable Education as a contribution to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the contest invited students from around the globe to create, edit, and submit short videos about the Earth's climate.

So – without further ado – we'd like to congratulate the winners, Sudhiksha, Eilene, and Alyssa for their video “Less Paper = Less Climate Change.” In their video, which they coded and edited in the Vidcode app, they explain the simple things people can help do to help combat climate change every day.

Their efforts have earned a new tablet computer, a science lab, and a premium Vidcode account for their classroom. Congratulations, Sudhiksha, Eilene, and Alyssa! 

Congratulations are also in order for our runners-up, whose videos you can view in the Contest Gallery, for their outstanding work in the categories of Research, Concept, Creativity, and Composition. Each category winner won PRO Vidcode accounts, .

The Award is intended to empower students to talk about climate change through art and technology, learning both about the critical environmental issues facing our planet, and about the methods of communication and innovation that will one day help solve them. To participate in this contest, students chose a topic related to climate change, researched that topic and then recorded a short video sharing their research, bringing art, education, and technology together to help change the world. 

If you missed the Girls Code 4 Climate competition, fear not! We will be hosting a GirlsCode4Energy@EDU contest in the spring. Sign up below for updates, and we'll see you soon!

Empowering Students to Talk About Climate Through Art and Technology

Vidcode is excited to announce the Girls Code 4 Climate @EDU Contest created along with Millennium@EDU Sustainable Education, as a Contribution to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The contest encourages students to use the skills (or as we call them, superpowers) they learn in computer science, art and media classes in new ways. 

To participate in this contest, students choose a topic related to climate, research that topic and then record a video sharing their research. Topics include:

1. Climate changes and its effects
2. Public responses to climate change
3. How climate changes impact your everyday life
4. What actions participants can take to make a difference

Once they've recorded their video, students add effects and graphics with JavaScript. They can use the graphics that Vidcode provides in creative and relevant ways, or they can create and upload their own. One student, Anna, created and coded a video using a yellow lawn in the background as an example of the drought she refers to and added graphics and effects in the scene to emphasize the lack of water.

We created a guide to help participants get started choosing and researching topics. It includes more information on the topics they can choose from, important climate terms and examples of how other artists are responding to climate change in their work.

Empowering students to show their point of view through art and technology is powerful. Art is a way to connect people with ideas that they would otherwise not be exposed to and gives artists a voice to say something they might not otherwise have been able to say. Alongside art, technology offers new media to create artworks, like creative coding, and new channels for messages to spread and be shared.

And this is important, historically art and technology combined have made a real impact. For example, Judy Collins took recordings of humpback whale songs and included them in her 1970 album Whales and Nightingales, which exposed millions of people to the beautiful and complex songs that whales use to communicate. These whale songs inspired the 'Save the Whales' movement, and in 1982, hunting whales became banned internationally.

We hope that this contest is a starting point for students to have conversations, and to research and create their own projects about climate and climate change, even after the contest ends. The top 5 winners of the contest will get full access to the Vidcode platform, offering them more tools to create projects with code and videos. And the overall winner will receive, in addition to full Vidcode access, a computer device designed for education and a science lab complete with sensors and software, so they can continue their research of the world around them.

Learn more about the contest and submit your own video, or use our Teacher Guide to bring coding, art and science into your classroom. The contest runs until November 15, 2015.