Asteroid Day Contests stimulate creativity

Contests are very popular on Asteroid Day. They are great alternatives to events and allow safe interaction with audiences of all ages, especially children and students. With various themes related to asteroids, participants are creatively challenged and can produce some magnificent results.

In this article, we’ve highlighted some contests created by organizers around the world that might inspire your next Asteroid Day activity:

The Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica from Chile annually organizes a short story contest that has become a tradition on Asteroid Day. Divided into categories, this activity invites elementary to high school students and the general public to create a fictional or reality-based story about asteroids.

One of the interesting points of this contest is that the word limit for the short story corresponds to the number of years since the Tunguska Event took place in 1908. For example, this year will be 114 years since the event that took place in Siberia and that inspired the Asteroid Day. So that means the participant will have a limit of 114 words for their short story.

Competitors create stories safely at home and submit them to the organization through a form created on the Google Drive cloud storage service.

Neurona Red from Mexico has also organized its story contest. With predefined themes related to asteroids and greater flexibility in the content size, on the last Asteroid Day, the stories were narrated by the authors in a live broadcast on Facebook, with a judging team listening and evaluating. This group also organized in 2021 a science poem contest, which can be adapted for Asteroid Day.

Other contests encourage the creation of Asteroid Day drawings and allow children of all ages to participate. The Haikintana from Madagascar and The Spaceport India Foundation held their drawing contests and had amazing results:

The drawings are usually made on paper and then photographed, scanned and sent to the organizers. But categories can also be created that encourage the use of drawing software such as GIMP, Krita and MyPaint.

Other contests may encourage the creation of posters and infographics about asteroids. These were some of the posters presented in a contest organized by Malaysia’s Planetarium Negara:

The judges evaluate the art quality and the relevance of the information included in the posters. Graphic editors like Canva, Snappa, Venngage and Visually are good options for creating them.

With the popularization of platforms and social networks, many organizers have encouraged the production of videos about asteroids. Some of them were turned into contests for children and teenagers. Watch these presentations by Aiman Farish, Arissa Masnizar and Nur Suhaizan for another contest also organized by Planetarium Negara using YouTube to post their videos.

The Astronomy group InSpace from Brazil, made up of teenagers, held an internal contest encouraging the posting of short videos about asteroids on Instagram. Check out these presentations by Samuel Costa, Kassandra Oliveira and Larissa Paiva made in the latest edition of Asteroid Day. The increasing use of short video sharing platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat and Kwai can inspire contests involving long-range media.

Now it is your turn! Create a contest that awakens your audience’s imagination. You can take the main events related to the asteroids scheduled for this year and turn them into themes. Establish clear rules and offer options that encourage large numbers of sign-ups.

Don’t forget to register it online and report them later. We will be happy to announce your winners in our media!

Have a good event!