2025 Middle School Winners

Aakriti Kurudumale and Sarah Zhou are in the 8th grade at Central Middle School in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. While creating their video was an assignment in their social studies class, they chose to submit it because they put a lot of effort into its creation and wanted to know how it would do in the competition. Aakriti and Sarah chose the topic sanitation because they saw the problems and issues around the world related to it and wanted to learn more. Prior to creating their video, they knew that sanitation access issues were significant and that they would increase with a growing population, but they were surprised to learn that over a billion people don’t have access to a private toilet.

The team got the idea for their video from a prototype for an eco-san toilet they found during their research. They really wanted to focus on creating something that would save water and reduce waste, which led to the idea for their solution: the eco-toilet. This was their first time creating an educational video, and Aakriti said the hardest part of the process was the animation. There were seven frames per second, which made creating the animation time consuming. Sarah shared that they used FlipaClip to help them animate but still had a lot to draw to finish the video by the deadline. The pair’s advice to future contest participants is to write the script and make sure the voice over is final before animating your video to help reduce the time needed for editing at the end.

Aakriti likes to read, write, swim, and performs semi-classical, ballroom, jazz, and ballet dance. Sarah plays the piano and the violin and is also a part of the science bowl and Science Olympiad at their school. She qualified for states with her project “Insulin: The Discovery that Changed Diabetes” for the National History Day competition last year. After high school Sarah is considering doing something related to biology or medicine, and Aakriti is thinking about business management or aeronautics. Sarah and Aakriti enjoyed working together on this project and are interested in creating more videos on other subjects in the future.