2. A couple weeks ago, my friend Cassie and I entered in a competition offered by the BYU education department. Basically we had to come up with some innovative use of technology that could be useful in a classroom setting, make a movie about it, and then present our idea to a panel of esteemed judges. Our idea was to use skype to facilitate community involvement through virtual volunteers. The volunteers could include parents, international "pen pals", or influential members of society (senators, famous authors, etc). After presenting to the judges, they deliberated, and the results were in! We got runner-up, with a total prize of $1000, meaning $500 apiece! Pretty awesome. Here we are. Famous.
3. We then entered our project into the "People's Choice" portion of the competition, which required us to get as many unique views on our youtube video as possible. We got extra points for the more states or different countries we got. Mitch is actually way more competitive than I am, so he took it upon himself to win this competition for us. He found this website that people post their videos on to get hits. The entire point of the website is "you watch my video, I'll watch yours." Due to this website, as well as the fact that we all had lots of friends and family living outside the US, we got a lot of hits from all over the world. By the end of the competition though, we were still lagging behind in terms of raw views. It was hard to tell who was going to win, since the hits don't include the point calculation for the extra countries and stuff. We were far enough behind though that we thought we had lost.
...a week later I get an email from the guy in charge of the competition. He said that due to the fact that we had far surpassed the other teams in number of countries and states (39 states, 92 countries, to be exact), we had racked up way more points that way and had won the competition!!! Can you believe it? Also I forgot to mention what the prize was...
dum da-da-dum! the ipad 2 ladies and gentlemen, wi-fi enabled, 32 Gb, retail $599. pretty much we have no use for it, since it doesn't have 3G internet. we figure they are trendy enough that we should be able to sell it pretty easily.
All in all, a pretty satisfying couple of weeks :D
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