Mr. Pedersen has started a competition within his graphic design classes at CHHS during March Madness with designed shoes.
What is it?
March Madness started as brackett competition between NBA teams that people would predict and bet on. This was adapted to fit a graphic design view.
Michael Pedersen, Graphic Design teacher, states, “So the March Madness shoe competition came from my desire to make my students work shown across the campus, and it was coming around March, and so I was into basketball at the time, and I thought this would be a fun little competition to do in my classroom.”
Each student will design a unique shoe using a mockup in which they adjust the colors, textures, lighting, and graphics on the shoe.
These then go into a group voting phase to whittle the number down until they can be entered into a brackett and go against each other one on one.
How did it gain its popularity?
Originally, there was no plan to popularize or advertise the competition.
Pedersen describes, “I had no clue it was gonna blow up as much as it did. So many other people got involved and really interested: teachers, other students. My younger graphic design and photography students were asking, ‘Hey, do we get to do that next year?’ and then having teachers and students that I didn’t even know […] came by and were like, ‘Are you gonna do the shoe thing again this year?’ I was like, really? Wow, that’s cool. So it blew up bigger than I was expecting it to.”
The thrill of design
As students in graphic design, we take pride in presenting our work to the public and being appreciated for such.
Pedersen understands this when he says, “I do put stuff online, but most of the students that follow that are ones that are either current students or former students, and some parents and stuff, which is awesome, but this is much more visible, and it gets a lot more students to see stuff,”
Giving the entire school the ability to vote allows more people to interact with graphic design while also giving the students more recognition.
Pedersen adds, “And it’s a positive thing for a lot of people to get involved in, you know, they can vote and they get like, they buy into it like, ‘ooh, I want rat toes to win! Oh I want this one to win’. So it works.”
Mr. Pedersen and his students feel a kinship with the competition, committing a deep level of devotion into it.
Demonstrating this, Pedersen says, “I mean of course it varies from person to person, but people seem to throw themselves into it and really hope, and then there was some disappointment when it went from 44 to 16. So that showed me that they actually cared,”
A moment of respect
Mr. Pedersen takes a lot of time out of his day and schedule in order to create, arrange, print, and post the posters for this competition.
Pedersen describes, “I’m hoping to carry it on, it does take a lot of work to coordinate and get everything going with the graphics but, I do think it’s a cool thing to do, so I gotta do this for as long as I can.”
The winner!
While the competition is still currently progressing there are some things that have already been decided.
As described by Mr. Pedersen, “The first year it (the reward prize) was sandwiches, the second year I bought gift cards to Amazon, so this year I’ll do the same thing. The winner will get a $50 gift card, and the second place we go $25, but ultimately the biggest prize is they get massive bragging rights for the fact that their shoe beat out everybody else.”
As a true teacher, Mr. Pedersen views all of his students as equals, unable to decide a favorite work.
“I can’t go down that road, there’s no way, I can’t vote for that yet. I liked every single shoe that was on instagram, so I kept it as clear and clean as possible.”
