Students Win C-SPAN StudentCam Contest

MADELINE PARAGAS
Staff Writer

AHS seniors Andy Chan, Shannon Kha and Aaqil Khan won second place in the West division for the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Networks (C-SPAN) annual StudentCam contest.

StudentCam is an annual nationwide competition for students in grades six through twelve. There are two categories: a Middle School and a High School category.

According to C-SPAN’s website, students were asked to create a short, five to seven minute video documentary on a topic related to the 2016 competition theme: the issue they most want the candidates to address during the 2016 presidential campaign. StudentCam released their topic on August last year.

“I have used C-SPAN resources for many years [and] have announced this competition in previous years to my classes [as a project],” Government/Economics teacher Johnnie Lau said.

Chan, Kha and Khan decided to do a short documentary on Social Security for a class assignment.

“All things are important in America, but after consulting [with each other and Lau] we ended up deciding on Social Security, because it is an issue that affects every single person in the U.S.,” Khan said.

In the documentary, they first addressed what Social Security is and how it works, then they interviewed local senior citizens and asked, “How has social security helped you?”

“Social Security is an issue that has not been talked much about [in the presidential campaign],” Kha said.

The short documentary is to air on Friday, April 8 on Charter Communication, an American cable telecommunications company.

“The topic was something interesting that we thought not many people would do. Along with the content, the filming of the video and the way everything came together in terms of music as well as cinematography made our video stand out,” Chan said.