I was invited to be a judge at this years’ Young ICT Explorers QLD competition for the Grade 4-5 category. Students from around the state come to UQ for the final and present their project in ICT to a panel of judges. On the day I judged 8 groups and visited a bunch more and was very impressed at the range and quality of projects by the children. The kids were very passionate and had lots of fun creating their projects which was evident by the great beaming smiles on all of their faces. It was cool to see most of the students had used Windows Live Movie Maker for their videos.
These young ladies in Grade 5 gained an equal 1st place for their project on the solar system. They’d created 2 educational games, a movie and a power point about space that included a hug amount of content they’d gathered from the web and books. The girls did a very professional presentation and were very clearly passionate about their project.
These young gentlemen gained 2nd place for their creation of a stop motion video using their Lego collection, Audacity, Windows Live Movie Maker etc. The boys had a great grasp over the tools and obviously had a lot of fun getting together after school to create their project. I was impressed by their ingenuity using the tv to shoot some of their backgrounds and their use of different scaled images to show perspective of a car driving down the road. I loved that their greatest challenge was “keeping the dog from eating the lego” 
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This young lady gained an equal 3rd place for her stop motion clay-mat ion video about why kookaburras and snakes aren’t friends. I loved the authentic Aussie bush makeover of her booth.
I have to give a big shout-out to the GRADE 3 (yes 8 year olds!) who weren’t officially in the competition who created an amazing video telling the story of the 3 little pigs from the wolf’s perspective. As a group of 8, they’d used robots all dressed up in costumes made by the kids and houses and props all put together by the group to make a cool video. They’d made a great journal with pictures of their journey and had a set of great videos interviewing the kids about how they made their project.
There were lots of interesting projects in the older grades including weather balloons, lego mindstorm with solar that tracks the sun etc. I’ve got a few more pictures of the day over here.