2021 Middle School Winners

Kayla Brezenski is in the 8th grade at Detroit Country Day Middle School. She lives in Royal Oak, Michigan and has lived there for about three years. Before moving to Michigan, she lived in Florida. Kayla learned of the contest in her science class as part of an assignment that her teacher suggested. She shared that she chose to address the relationship between fossil fuels and global health because “it’s a hot topic that is dying down and people are aware of its effect on the Earth but not on our health”. Kayla is passionate about sharing the message on the impact of fossil fuels on our health. To create her video, Kayla “watched a lot of videos by a YouTube channel called ‘ASAP Science’”, and used the same format the channel did to relay her message about the danger of fossil fuels to the world.

This is Kayla’s first experience with filmmaking and video editing, aside from helping her brother with his film projects. For Kayla, the hardest part of the process was “all the research that went into it,” adding that it was also hard to “cover a very broad topic in under a minute.” Kayla has competed in a scholastic writing competition and received an honorable mention, making her a two-time award winner for academic projects. She advises future contest participants to not get discouraged if they don’t think their video is that good. “As long as you had fun making it and you’re proud of it, you’re good to go,” she said. For next year’s contest topics, Kayla suggests deforestation and the eradication of environmental issues that affect the population negatively. In her words, “it happens in both urban and remote places like the Amazon and it has a huge effect on our entire world.”

When Kayla is not educating the world of the dangers of fossil fuels, she is performing in the theater. Theater is her favorite hobby and she has been doing it since a very young age, and would also love to continue it as a career. Kayla is inspired by her older brother, a high school senior who was recently accepted to the Air Force Academy. She hopes to have a reputation and a support system similar to her brother and she hopes to be as good of a person as he is.