Every year, students from all over the state come to Manhattan to compete in the Kansas Student Technology Leaders contest that is held at the Kansas State University Student Union. This year, seven Manhattan High students competed in three events and all seven placed.

The three events that MHS students competed in were Graphic Design, Public Service Announcement and Web Design.

“For graphic design we designed a poster, banner, raffle ticket and a T-shirt about the MHS orchestra and for the PSA, the topic was healthy eating so we made a video about healthy eating at our school.,” sophomore Youna Song said. “It was a good experience and I had a lot of fun.”

Youna placed first in Graphic Design along with sophomore Younjin Song and freshman Stephanie Fu. Youna also placed first in the Public Service Announcement event alongside sophomore Owen Li and sophomore Tony Liu.

Li placed third in Graphic Design with Liu, sophomore Nolan Blankenau and sophomore Eric Higgins and also enjoyed competing in the contest.

“[My favorite part was] working with my friends to come up with the ideas and get them into the computer and stuff like that,” Li said. “We put a lot of time and effort into it and it’s nice to see it pay off.”

Graphic Design was added to the list of events at the competition last year and it sparked an interest in MHS students.

“Graphic design was a new category last year and I saw how people did it and I thought it would be interesting to try this year and web design is just something I enjoy doing,” Fu said. “I like programming and I wanted to teach people how to program so I decided to make a website.”