What Happens When 8th Graders Tackle a Real-World Problem? They Win an International Film Award

There's project-based learning, and then there's your 8th-grade class project ending up in an international film festival.

A group of recent graduates of The Children's School in Oak Park just did exactly that.

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The students won the $500 Environmental Activism Award (Local) in the One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest for their short film, Generating Our Future.

And the subject they chose couldn't be much more timely: data centers and their growing impact on the Great Lakes.

The students created the eight-minute film last year as 8th graders during a class project exploring the Great Lakes. Rather than simply learning facts about one of the world's largest freshwater systems, they dug into an issue unfolding right now in our own backyard.

Their film explores the enormous amount of water required to cool data centers, the rapid expansion of those facilities around the Great Lakes, and questions about how that water use is tracked and disclosed.

You can read more about the students' project and award in The Children's School's announcement here.

This is what learning can look like

At The Children's School, we talk a lot about experiential and project-based learning. Those phrases can sound a little education-jargony until you see what they actually mean in practice.

This is what they mean.

Students encounter a real problem. They ask questions. They research it. They figure out which sources they can trust. They wrestle with complicated information. They collaborate with other humans, which may occasionally be the hardest part of any group project. They decide what they think. And then they have to communicate those ideas clearly enough that someone else will actually care.

The finished product isn't just something handed to a teacher, graded, and stuffed into a backpack.

It goes out into the world.

In this case, quite literally.

The One Earth Young Filmmakers Contest invites young people ages 8 to 25 to create short environmental films designed to inspire action and change. This year's contest received 428 submissions from 58 countries and 35 states.

Winning films represent young filmmakers from around the world, and right there among them is a film created by middle school students in Oak Park.

That's pretty darn cool.

Preparing kids for a world we can't entirely predict

There's a tendency in education to think of "preparing students for the future" as pushing tomorrow's academics into younger and younger grades.

But the world our kids will inherit isn't going to hand them a worksheet with one correct answer.

They're going to encounter messy problems involving technology, climate, communities, economics, ethics, and competing interests. Many of the jobs they'll eventually have probably don't exist yet. Some of the problems they'll be asked to solve don't either.

So perhaps the most valuable preparation we can give them isn't simply more information.

It's teaching them how to think.

How to investigate something they don't understand yet.

How to ask better questions.

How to work with people who see things differently.

How to connect ideas across subjects.

How to communicate what they've learned.

And how to recognize that their voices can matter right now, not someday when they're adults.

That philosophy is central to The Children's School's mission, which emphasizes experiential learning, intellectual curiosity, collaboration, and helping children become thoughtful, engaged members of their communities.

Generating Our Future is a pretty wonderful example of that philosophy leaving the classroom and entering the world.

And you can see their film

Generating Our Future, along with the other winning films, will premiere during the One Earth Young Filmmakers Global Awards Celebration at 10 a.m. Sunday, September 27, at the Davis Theater, 4614 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago.

The celebration is free, and you can attend either in person or virtually from anywhere in the world.

Register here for free tickets or virtual access to the Global Awards Celebration.

We're obviously incredibly proud of the students and teachers who made this project possible.

But I'm also excited about what their accomplishment represents.

Because these students didn't spend 8th grade merely preparing to become high school students.

They practiced becoming researchers, collaborators, storytellers, critical thinkers, problem solvers, and engaged citizens.

The award is pretty fantastic.

What they learned while earning it might be even better.

If this is the kind of education you've been looking for for your child, connect with The Children's School to learn more about its K–8 experiential and project-based learning program and how it is preparing tomorrow's thinkers, problem solvers, and leaders.

About the author: Laurie Christofano is a parent at The Children's School, a Realtor with RE/MAX In The Village, a native gardener with Spoke Pockette Gardens, and a co-admin of Oak Park Working Moms (OPWM). She writes about education, community, homes, gardening, and the wonderfully interconnected ways we build places where people can thrive.