Anna Olson gets some help from her father, brothers
By Jessica A. York
jyork@santacruzsentinel.com @ReporterJess on Twitter
Posted: 05/22/2014 04:13:00 PM PDT
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SANTA CRUZ >> Ever since Anna Olson was a little girl, she has been dreaming about 'up there,' gazing at the moon and stars and thinking about how the universe works.
When she came back down to Earth, the science-oriented 15-year-old managed to snag one of three NASA video contest awards.
In March, while scouring through her math teacher's pile of projects, Olson was attracted to the sciences section, and discovered NASA's 2014 educational 'REEL Science Communications' video contest.
In a two-week period, Olson pulled together two different contest entries, with a little help from dad and movie producer Gregory T. Olson's green screen, brother Geoffrey Olson's guitar-strumming skills and fact-checking by older brother Alec Olson, who works in a lab at UC Davis.
'It was just gathering information and then translating it into something that was my own,' Olson said of her video. '(When the win was announced) I was like, 'what!' I was pretty stoked.'
In the midst of finals at PCS, however, Olson said she pushed last week's big win to the back burner.
The Pacific Collegiate School student reviewed her video entries, posted on YouTube during an interview at her school. She pointed out that her winning entry had a special touch, her own 'brand.' Writing rhyming lyrics about global warming facts, she said, was easier said than done.
'Climate change affects the world, every boy and girl,' Olson sings over changing graphics in her video. 'Volcanoes, fires and factories too, dust and cars and stuff we use, all contribute to global warming, ice caps melting and not reforming.'
The contest, in its second year, asks high school students from the ages of 13 to 18 to create two-minute educational earth sciences videos designed to engage middle school students, NASA officials said. This year, there were 22 entrants, including Olson's.
'These videos reflect a technical expertise in videography combined with an interest in science that ranges from the super serious to the playful,' said Claire Parkinson, project scientist for the Aqua satellite mission. 'We are very pleased to have NASA Earth science imagery used by these talented and motivated teenagers, all of whom have the potential to become future scientists.'
Olson said she will have an opportunity to follow up on her contest win with a video phone call from a NASA scientist during the summer, and potentially make more educational videos with them.
Lisa Michael, Olson's conceptual physics teacher, said the budding videographer is a enthusiastic, positive and a 'real spark plug' in class. She recalled Olson being 'enthralled' during the class' one astronomy lesson.
'This (video) was 100 percent her own thing, and it was really impressive,' Michael said. 'She seemed like a professional newscaster, with her quality of delivery.'
For information about the REEL Science contest online, visit reelscience.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Entities 0 Name: Olson Count: 9 1 Name: NASA Count: 5 2 Name: Anna Olson Count: 2 3 Name: Pacific Collegiate School Count: 1 4 Name: Geoffrey Olson Count: 1 5 Name: NASA Earth Count: 1 6 Name: Gregory T. Olson Count: 1 7 Name: Michael Count: 1 8 Name: moon Count: 1 9 Name: UC Davis Count: 1 10 Name: Jessica A. York Count: 1 11 Name: Claire Parkinson Count: 1 12 Name: SANTA CRUZ & GT Count: 1 13 Name: Earth Count: 1 14 Name: Lisa Michael Count: 1 15 Name: gsfc Count: 1 16 Name: Alec Olson Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1mY4env Title: How Kids See Space Description: In 1977, a year after the U.S. Bicentennial, the oil company ARCO asked Americans of the time what they thought the U.S. would look like to the Americans 100 years later, at the nation's Tricentennial. Their answers were recorded in a document, The Tricentennial Report , that featured, among other things, children's imaginings of 2077.
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