Picture Rupp Arena filled with almost 21,000 students all immersed with talent showing up with phenomenal projects never seen before.
Drone racing, robot fights, media illustrations, and digital books are just a handful of the varieties of projects featured in Kentucky’s State STLP competition and four of our GRC students were recognized at this year’s competition.
Graduates Emmie Rose, Ava Woolum, Liam Parido, and Isaiah Epperson advanced and made it to the state level with their outstanding projects submitted.
Emmie and Ava were state champions in the Feature Video category, Isaiah was state champion in the Animation category, and Liam was a finalist in the Logo Creation category.
The Student Technology Leadership Program (STLP) gives students the opportunity to design, learn, and create, and has been hosting state competition for 30 years.
Leading up to the day of competition there was lots of decision making and preparation necessary for submissions.
“We went through all of our videos that we’ve made throughout the year and after a while we decided on a couple of them to submit,” explains Ava. “Once we decided on one of our football videos we had to do a write up and explain everything we did to produce the video.”
These four students’ expectations about the competition were nothing but exceeded after stepping in the doors of the arena.
“It was really shocking to see everything,” says Emmie. “We never realized how big this program was until we went. We had heard a lot about it over the past couple years, but going into it, we were not expecting it to be this large a deal.”
Attending the competition not only showed them about the program itself but also gave them an opportunity to see all of the student-created media projects.
“It was awesome to see what other people around the state are able to produce at their schools because we’re only part of such a small community,” Liam says. “It was really cool to get to see the bigger picture.”
The program is clearly extremely committed and passionate about showing off the talent of every single participant no matter the age or category.
“They make the kids feel really important, like every one of them were all being awarded for something really big,” says Rose.
Our four students’ hopes are that we can see GRC’s participation in the competition continue over the coming years.
“We have a lot of talented people at GRC and I think next year we can go and fill out some of the other categories they have,” says Parido.
