2024 High School Winners

Grace Lee is in 10th grade at Eastlake High School in Chula Vista, California. She found out about the World of 8 Billion contest by searching for opportunities online to make videos. She loves environmental science and biology and enjoys making films, so this contest was the perfect chance to combine those passions. Grace chose to create her video about invasive species because she was drawn to the struggle for dominance and survival that these species have. She connected those themes to stories she enjoys reading like The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien and Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, a Chinese classic. She knew that humans introduce invasive species but was surprised that ballast water of ships is one of the largest reasons there are many invasive species in marine environments.

Grace got the idea for her video after watching a news segment about blue crabs infesting the Mediterranean Sea. She is also an avid gardener so that is how she came up with the solution to use the crab shells as a fertilizer. Grace has made numerous educational videos previously, but she shared that the most challenging part of creating this video was syncing her voice-over audio with the outdoor scenes she filmed. The microphone at the beach scenes picked up a lot of wind so she did the voice over at home and spent hours editing so it would match up. Grace used Scratch to create her animations, including the different crabs and the thunderstorm movements in her video. Some advice she has for future participants is to “always start with a storyboard before you do any filming, editing or effects because it helps you organize your ideas and it also gives you a logical timeline for your video.”

Grace is inspired by Dr. Leete, her AP Biology teacher, and Mr. Smith, her AP Environmental Science teacher, because of their passion and ability to make science fun. She is the education chair of MiRcore, a national organization that connects high schoolers with opportunities to conduct their own research in computational biology. Through MiRcore she has presented to over 200 middle and high school students at the Scripps Institute. She is also published in a peer reviewed research paper on the effects of vaping, which she worked on with Dr. Hong Wei Chu during an internship. In addition to science, Grace loves learning about different cultures and studying new languages. She fluently speaks English, Spanish, and Chinese and is learning French on her own. Currently she plans on going into a software-oriented job like computer science or computational biology after high school, but she wants to keep her options open.