Sheffield students make TWDK science videos

We issued our challenge through the university's Venture Matrix™ scheme.

Earlier this year, we set students from Sheffield Hallam University a challenge - to take one of our published science articles, and turn it into a video. Four groups of media students took up the gauntlet, and over the next few months the students created four very different videos.

The students had a total freedom of choice regarding which of our articles they chose, and the style they would use to make the video. Our only condition was that each group choose a different article.
It seems SHU students must have a love of space, because their chosen articles were:
Do Aliens Exist? (Ed Trollope, TWDK)
Juno - halfway there and home again (Cian O'Regan, Irish Space Blog)
Pluto's New Horizons (Peter Ray Allison, freelance journalist)
Why are the planets so different? (Adam Stevens, Open University)

Throughout the project TWDK were on hand to offer support and guidance via email and we held a teleconference to discuss progress every few weeks, but the projects were done at the university and will count as part of the students' degree coursework. We provided voice-overs with male/female voices to two of the groups, while the other two chose to create their own. As such, this project represented a wonderful demonstration of what students can do with our content and how we can support them if they wish to work in partnership with us.

This is also a good example as to why the CC-BY licence was our preferred copyright model. Under this licence, students (or anybody else) are free to make such videos or use our content in other ways, provided they give us the attribution for the original work - this helps us ensure the maximum number of people can benefit from our content and are free to transform it from one media to another. You can read more about creative common licences, and our licence in particular, at creativecommons.org.

Over the next few weeks, we shall be sharing these videos with you through our YouTube channel. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did, and that you will show your support and encouragement for the students who made them. And of course, we'd love to hear from other groups who'd like to use our content for similar projects! If you'd like to discuss a partnership with us, just send us an email.

Edit: all four videos can now be found in this post