The NPR Student Podcast Challenge(NPR / NPR)NPR is once again inviting students across the country to tell their stories through audio as part of its annual Student Podcast Challenge. Now in its eighth year, the competition has introduced students from all 50 states and Washington, D.C. to the wor ld of public radio and podcasting.LPM’s Ayisha Jaffer spoke with Steve Drummond and Janet Woojeong Lee, two of the people behind NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge about what to expect this year.The deadline for the Student Podcast Challenge is May 31.This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.Ayisha Jaffer: Tell me about the student podcast challenge. Where did this all begin?Steve Drummond: About eight years ago, there was a lot of discussion around the country of hearing from young people and elevating student voices. We're the education team, and trying to put our money where our mouth was in terms of encouraging project-based learning and hearing the voices of kids, we created this competition as an experiment.We thought maybe we would get 50 podcasts, or 500, that first year. We got 5,500 student podcasts. And we realized we were on to something, and we have kept it going ever since.AJ: So who is this challenge open to this year?Janet Woojeong Lee: This year the challenge is open to students from grades four through 12. So we have the fourth-grade category middle school for students in grades five through eight, and then the high school category for students in grades nine through 12.And we ask that for the Student Podcast Challenge for our younger students, you work with someone who is 18 or older to submit. That can be your teacher, your librarian, after-school program educators, sometimes parents — we really try to make it as open to students as possible.AJ: And also, there's something exciting this year, right? There's a new prize.JL: That's right, we have the new special theme prize for America 250 to celebrate the nation's 250th birthday this summer. We're asking students all around the country to tell us about what it feels like to be American. It can be a historic story, a family story, something you're learning in class that you're inspired by — we're open to all of it, and just curious to see how different students in different communities and places around the country interpret it.AJ: You've both said you've heard thousands of submissions, but is there a story that you can share that's stood out to each of you?SD: Last year, we got a delightful podcast from some middle schoolers about Bigfoot. This young student and his brother told us everything we would want to know about Bigfoot in the most hilarious way. They had a little song about Bigfoot that they sang in the beginning, and they explored the myths and the science behind Bigfoot. It was just absolutely delightful.Janet, do you have a favorite?JL: Yeah, there was one that we received from a student at the University of Delaware. Her podcast was called “Dear Little Sister,” and it was these letters that she exchanged with her younger sister, who had just enlisted in the military. The podcast was just so authentic. She read letters that they had exchanged.A young person, kind of reflecting on her relationship with her sister, and what it means to send away family to something like this and see especially a younger sibling going so far away, and how that changed your family dynamic.AJ: For students who might be on the fence about entering, what would you want them to know?SD: I think in your imagination, that students think it needs a lot of fancy equipment or some kind of recording studio or an expensive microphone to do this. And the thing we try to emphasize over and over again is that all you need is really a smartphone and a laptop and some free editing software, and you can learn how to do this.It doesn't require some big, elaborate journalistic project. We've heard so many students taking on a simple thing in their own lives. We've had an excellent podcast over the years of students with autism or we had a student who was deaf, or we had a student who was exploring his own mental health in a really compelling way.So it really ends up being the podcasts that stand out to us are students who identify a story they really care about. They're really passionate about it, and that's what time and time again really comes through in these podcasts. ...read more read less