A trio of Swift Current Comprehensive High School students are a couple of bucks richer, gaining a few more marks, following a unique lesson on safety.

A teacher at the high school, Lisa Bender had two of her classes produce videos about safety to compete in a province-wide safety awareness competition.

A challenge was sent out to schools across the province encouraging youth to create a video about safety.

Heeding this call, videos from Bender's class were submitted to the Saskatchewan Workers' Compensation Board who ran the contest, which resulted in one Swift Current group placing third across the province.

A Test of Focus was created by Swift Current Comprehensive High School students Nicole Steinley, Jenna Sloman, and Lucas Friesen, earning them a $500 reward. An additional $750 was also given to the school itself.

Sloman said that the unique safety education program was enjoyable for the group.

"It was a lot of fun, we got to express our ideas in a way that we all agreed upon, and we had a lot of fun doing it."

She said that a lot of editing went into the video, but in the end it all paid off.

A couple of teachers also took part in the video, supporting the students towards their video production payday.

Friesen said that with safety being a concern across the board, whether at school or at work, educating people about precautions is needed to ensure safety was important.

"I know in Saskatchewan here, there are a lot of injuries that take place with youth in the workplace, and I think expressing our knowledge, and showing everybody else how important it is to stay safe at work is important, so it's pretty cool."

He said that he was able to bring safety skills he learned through the project to his actual workplace.

Expressing creativity was just as essential to the project as the safety advice given in it, said Bender.

"When we watched some of the videos, the groups were like 'oh yeah we can do something like this', so most of the groups had a lot of fun filming and editing, and working together as a group."

Brad Compton, account manager with the Workers' Compensation Board, said that this year's competition saw a lot of great submissions and a close competition.

"This year the video contest was a huge success, we had around 45 video entries this year, which is one of our best years that we've had in quite a long time.

"We've been doing this contest for a number of years now, and it was a success for sure."

He went on to mention that being in the top three of those 45 videos was no small feat.

"I'd like to say congratulations to those students, with that many submissions this year, I think it really is a kudos to them to come in third place."

He said that the project had a two-pronged approach to teaching young people about safety through the actual video production, and the education that the videos give their viewers.