2018 Middle School Winners

Kristine Ndubisi, Jacqueline (Jackie) Balanovsky, Shazray Akbar, Adriana Maratov, and Matthew Stephen are in 7^th and 8^th grade at The Meadows School in Las Vegas, NV. They learned about the contest in their elective class, Competitive Science, in which student’s research academic contests that match their interests and work on them in class. Everyone in this group “had an interest in making a video” for a contest, so when their teacher suggested the World of 7 Billion competition, they quickly formed this outstanding team to take on the challenge together.

The team said that researching and producing the video gave them a much deeper understanding of population and its connections to other global issues. They chose to focus their video on Feeding 10 Billion and food waste because it is already a hot topic at their school. They’ve had special presentations and outside speakers teach them about food waste and its impacts, and the school’s Girl Scout troop recently did a project on global hunger. The group thought the school “was a great setting for exploring the issues of nutrition and food waste” because schools struggle with these problems on a smaller scale. The most challenging part of the video was finding time to get together for filming and combining everyone’s ideas into one collaborative video. Even though the group dynamic can be difficult logistically, they loved sharing ideas with each other and working together as a team.

They are all very thankful for their teacher, Mr. Trujillo, who is always encouraging them to try new things and work problems out on their own. Kristine loves math and science, plays volleyball and piano, and likes reading books and eating ice cream. Jackie’s favorite subjects are Latin and science, she plays volleyball and enjoys poetry and performing on stage (break a leg in the Wizard of Oz this spring!). Sharzay loves math and science, plays volleyball and tennis, and might want to be president someday! Adriana moved to Las Vegas from London last year, and enjoys math and science, playing tennis, and artistic pursuits including painting, sculpting and photography. Matthew loves science and every other subject, plays a lot of basketball, and is part of the school band as a percussionist and baritone player.