Three Kent schools have been recognized in the International Student Media Festival for student-created video projects.
Projects from Pine Tree Elementary School, Meeker Middle School and Kent Mountain View Academy will be among the honorees at the awards ceremony Nov. 1-3 in Louisville, Ky.
Taking cues from Hollywood, every year the Kent School District celebrates student film and video game makers, who receive awards in the district’s VISFEST, or visual literacy program festival.
The annual festival is complete with a red carpet, balloons, cameras and all the hype of a mini-Oscar ceremony. Video projects from schools in the district must first receive recognition at VISFEST before they can get sponsorship to compete in the international awards.
Students in the district create the atmosphere and manage the VISFEST awards program. They also are responsible for creating the criteria with which to judge the projects. They are all a part of the STEP Leadership Team, which helps the district carry out technology projects.
Kent Meridian senior Jonathan Sooter is participating in the STEP program for the second year now and interns at district headquarters in the Information Technology Department.
“It’s a great program. It gives students and staff the chance to get recognized and on to international competition,” Sooter said of helping with this year’s VISFEST awards.
Sooter hopes to be a Web developer someday, adding, “STEP has been everything and a little bit more in supporting” his dream.
This is the kind of attitude Jeff Thungc hopes to foster and inspire among students in the district as they try to harness technology. Thungc is the student technology programs manager in the Kent School District’s IT Department.
“In visual literacy and digital media production, the meat of the learning is not the project itself,” Thungc said. “It is the process of the production of the project.”
He hopes and sees students generating ideas, organizing them, constructing sentences and composing all of it into more and more complex projects throughout the years.
VISFEST has existed since 2002 and Thungc has been with the program since 2009.
The visual literacy program in the district is not just for upper high school classes studying video production, graphic design, Java and C++ programming software. Even kindergarten classes submit projects like one musical that was done with drawings and readings of text in songs.
Pine Tree Elementary School won at the international level for its video project called, “The Perfect Heist.”
“This year they did win an award, which is pretty incredible for an elementary school,” said Thungc, recalling that Pine Tree had to compete among a thousand other entries.
“I hate to boast, but we’re considered a best practice site in terms of technology and integration for Microsoft (products),” Thungc said. “So we have visitors from all over the world, like Norway, England, Singapore and various places.”
Within the district, there are about 10 to 20 classes that participate in VISFEST every year, with usually about four or five making it to the International Student Media Festival and two to three projects receiving awards there.
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