I did my Cas project with my classmate Louis, we decided to make a podcast discussing our experiences with the island-wide lockdown in Sri Lanka and the COVID pandemic.

The goal for our CAS project: To create a podcast that discusses how the COVID pandemic affects us as well as the rest of the world. We discussed things that we had learnt during the lockdown in Sri Lanka and what we gained from the experience. The podcast will essentially be 30 minutes long.

We planned a 30-minute talking session that would hit all of these key points and how they may generate further ideas.

Prior to recording our final podcast, we had actually previously recorded an “episode.” However, this didn’t discuss any of our ideas and we continued to stray away from how the covid pandemic affected us.

Therefore we decided to replan and retry recording the podcast to see if we could come up with an interesting episode that discussed more concise ideas. Some of the questions that allowed us to generate conversations were things such as:

1. How did the lockdown affect us mentally?
2. How did it affect our motivation or work ethic?
3. Were we more self-motivated or less?
4. What did we end up doing in our free time?
5. What skills have we gained because of the lockdown?
6. Did this experience teach us to be more independent?
7. How did we manage to stay active during lockdown?
8. Did we gain any hobbies during lockdown?

We used these questions as springboards to generate ideas for ourselves but we didn’t write out a script because it needed to be more organic.

Challenges/Learnings:

• Creating a topic that we wanted to focus on
  • The covid pandemic is a very wide topic and if we tried to talk about everything such as how it affected other countries or the ethics of vaccines we would be talking for hours. We had to make a decision on what we wanted to focus on.
• Making sure the conversation during our recording was focused
  • We didn’t want to create a script when we recorded or the conversation would sound forced. Therefore we found ourselves occasionally straying away from the topic of discussion so it was challenging to make sure everything we were talking about was relevant.

Success of project:

The project ended up being a success, we managed to record it without stopping for 30 minutes and for the most part kept our ideas concise. The beginning was a little rocky as we began talking about movies but at the end, you could hear that we hit all of our targets in terms of the topic we wanted to discuss. We also managed to get some of our peers to listen to it and give us feedback! We had a lot of positive comments about it but something they said we could have improved on is maybe discussing the ethical implications of vaccines since Sri Lanka has been receiving shipments and they are being administered.

Who knows maybe Louis and I will a new career in podcasting!