OREANDA-NEWS. August 13, 2012. Panasonic Corporation announced that Sembawang Secondary School from Singapore won the Grand Prix Award of the Panasonic Kid Witness News (KWN) Global Contest 2012. The announcement was made at the award ceremony which started at 14:00 (BST) at the Grand Connaught Rooms in London with representatives of the six finalist schools attended, reported the press-centre of Panasonic. 

This year's finalists, selected from among the films - up to five minute long - submitted by 718 schools from 31 countries and regions around the world, dealt with a variety of issues within the two themes of the contest: ecology and communication, including recycling, family ties and friendship, as well as hardships caused by last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

The Grand Prix winning video features a story of a young girl who grieves over her sister's suicide and her inability to prevent it with closer communications within the family. The film is titled "The First Appearance of Light" after the girl's name, Dawn.

Each of the six finalists representing China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States also received a KWN Global Award trophy in different categories (see the table on next page).

Japan's Iwasaki Junior High School from Fukushima Prefecture in the northeastern coastal region hit hard by the disaster in March last year won the Best Witness award with their video titled "We Are From..." The film shares hardships gone through by the students and their family and friends through interviews and conveys their gratitude for people who extended help and pride in their home town.

KWN is a hands-on video education program designed to help children develop creativity and cognitive and communication skills through the use of video. Panasonic provides video cameras and other equipment to participating schools for their video productions. Since the KWN program was started in 1989 in the U.S., more than 160,000 students and teachers around the world have participated to date, with currently some 10,000 taking part each year.

In the global contest, videos that won national and regional KWN contests were screened first by local judges of the KWN offices around the world and then by a panel of international judges including experts in film-making, education and journalism to determine the Grand Prix and category awards.

All of the above works can be viewed at the Web site: http://panasonic.net/kwn/contest2012/