The competition was divided into two categories – the Public Award and the Jury Award - and had in total three separate winners. Authors of all the winning videos received nice prizes, such as an iPad mini.
The Jury Award winners
The jury of the competition consisted of Dave Blank, representing MESA+, and Albert van den Berg representing MIRA institute. The jury awarded two separate prizes, one for each of the collaborating institutes. The jury judged the videos based on how well they portrayed the given scientific idea, if they represented a relevant research and if the video showcased a sense of humor.
The MIRA winner of the Jury Award was a video titled ‘Physics of Fluids – Inkjet Flight 20’, created by Erik Jan Staat, who unfortunately didn’t attend the award show. Staat´s video cleverly represents the research done by Physics of Fluids group.
‘Physics of Fluids – Inkjet Flight 20’video (MIRA winner):
A video ‘Project Neymar’ was announced as the MESA+ winner of the Jury Award. This short movie presents the research of bone filler materials and was made by Anne Leferink and Martijn Tibbe.
‘Project Neymar’ video (MESA+ winner):
Unreliable results
The competition also included the Public Award, determined by a popular vote. The original idea was to allow people to vote through social media. Unfortunately, it was discovered that results based on these rules were unreliable and might lead to an unjust decision. All submitted videos were accessible on the ‘20 seconds science’ Facebook page, where anybody could vote for their favorite short film. One Facebook ‘like’ equaled one vote and whichever video received the most ‘likes’ was supposed to be declared the winner of the Public Award. However, it seems that fake Facebook accounts were created in order to provide ‘likes’ for chosen videos.
Winner of the Public Award
For these reasons, the organizers of the competition were forced to change the rules. The winner of the Public Award was therefore chosen based on votes taken during the award show on the 3rd of March 2015. Each attendee of the event had one vote to give to their favorite video. In the end, the Public Award went to a video ‘Developmental Bioengineering’, created by Rong Wang and Piet Dijkstra and displaying the research of injectable hydrogels.
‘Developmental Bioengineering – Injectable Hydrogels’ (Public Award winner):
