2023 Middle School Winners

Alice Feng and Eva Chen are both 8th graders at Eastside Preparatory School in Kirkland, Washington. They found out about the World of 8 Billion contest through their environmental practice class, where their teacher made it an assignment. Eva completed a climate change video for that class assignment, but was inspired to make another one, especially when both her and Alice noticed that all of their classmates were focusing on topics other than gender equality. They had been learning about population in class, but didn’t know about the gender aspect of it until researching for their video and discovering that women face a lot of inequality, which can lead them to have more children.

Neither Eva or Alice had made a video like this before, so when it came to splitting up the work, they did their best to divide tasks equally. Eva did the digital artwork for the video, as well as the voice over. Alice touched up the art and edited the video. Together, they researched their topic and wrote the script. It was actually through their general research that they were able to narrow down on their topic of child marriage, as it was something that kept coming up. Alice found the most challenging part of the project was that she “had really high expectations on how the video would turn out and it was a lot more work than [she] initially thought it would be.” Eva found it hard to cut down their script to make it fit the one-minute timeframe. Alice’s advice for future participants is “to make your video stand out” and Eva’s is to “find just a specific part of something that you’re really passionate about and want to learn more about.”

In her free time, Eva likes to draw, something she has been doing since she was four years old. Her dad taught her how to draw initially and when he saw how much she enjoyed it, he put her into art classes. Since then, she has taken art classes both in and out of school. Eva hopes to make her art into a career just like her art teacher, who inspires her a lot. Alice also enjoys drawing and the arts in general. In addition to creating digital art, she has been taking classes in piano for 7-8 years and the violin for two years. She has even started composing her own music for the piano. Alice doesn’t know exactly what she wants to do yet when she graduates high school, but is thinking about the film industry or maybe astronomy.