Lorena (Year 13) was a member of the winning team at the 2019 Schools Economics challenge. She tells us what it was like to take part in the competition.

I first found out about the competition from my media teacher, Mr Mackney, who suggested that Luke and I should participate in the CORE Schools Economics Challenge.

The competition sees students from across the globe creating videos that address a key economic topic. This year’s topic is ‘Why is addressing climate change so difficult?’ This really appealed to me as I am a member of the Academy Eco-Council.

As we were entering into the collaborative category, we teamed up with St Paul’s School. My role, together with Luke, was to develop creative ideas on how to approach an audience who are not economists. We decided to include animations to help explain our arguments.

The boys from St Paul’s School worked on the arguments to put forward and developed the script. I was in charge of filming and editing the video, whilst Luke was the one who animated parts of the video and helped me with the filming. Being Media students, we had to take their script and make it come to life.

I enjoyed the collaboration process. The boys from St Paul’s School were committed and professional. We were happy with the results but we did not expect to win our category given how strong all the entries were.

We were on the October half-term when I checked my email and saw a message from both Mr Mackney and Mr Saunders giving us congratulations for winning the Best Collaborative Entry. I immediately messaged the boys from St. Paul’s School, who were as excited as me!

The Judges praised our project commenting that we covered a “wide range of economic theory, including discussion of lobbying power and politics, and one of the few videos to use game theory and explain it well to a general audience.”

Overall the experience was fantastic. I really recommend it to other student to take part in these type of experiences as you really develop great skills, and it provides you with positive contributions towards your CV or personal statement that will make you stand out from the crowd.