The 2nd AerPrize competition was announced recently.
Its a pretty amazing prize: Two students will win all-paid private pilot certification training in the United States by Angel City Flyers. This is only open to Irish students and I can attest to how well run the whole thing is. A student in one of my classes was a winner two years ago and soon after his Leaving Cert flew out to California where he spent the summer getting back to Dublin in time to start college, with both an amazing experience and a pilots license to his credit.
I'd like to be able to claim that it was all down to my inspirational teaching and that I had mentored him throughout the process, digging deep into my own knowledge and understanding of the physics of aviation in order to do so, but that simply wouldn't be true. My contribution was to point out to the class the following salient points:
the prize looked amazing, and would be worth thousands if you had to pay for it
the competition was only open to Irish secondary students, so the field would be relatively small
when you factor in al the kids who would like to win but couldn't be bothered making a video, the field would be even smaller
if your video was even half good, you had to have a decent chance of winning
Sure enough, half the class was interested, but only two went as far as making a video. Both of them were really good and I'm including the winning entry below. Or you could follow this link to a whole set of video entries. The standard is high, but I think its also important to note that its not sooo high as to be unmatchable. The video I know about was made using the 'record' feature on PowerPoint that I'd often noticed but never used. And the technical information on flight is all available on the Aerprize website