{"id":289523,"date":"2026-05-29T23:34:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T23:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/289523\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T23:34:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T23:34:10","slug":"mariner-graduate-crafts-science-saves-video-about-her-cousin-and-wins-10000-wgcu-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/289523\/","title":{"rendered":"Mariner graduate crafts ‘Science Saves’ video about her cousin and wins $10,000 | WGCU News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elyssa Vazquez of Cape Coral saw a notice on TikTok about a scholarship contest, entered and won.<\/p>\n

Vazquez, who is graduating from Mariner High School on Sunday, was browsing social media when she saw that a video contest called \u201cScience Saves\u201d was offering a $10,000 scholarship to a college-bound high school senior. One of the prompts was to create a 20- to 30-second video answering the question, \u201cWhat has science done for somebody I know?\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ava<\/p>\n

“I immediately thought of my cousin Ava,” Vazquez said. “She’s a super vibrant person, but living with epilepsy means facing constant unpredictability. \u2026 growing up she had to navigate the scary reality of sudden seizures and I wanted to share her story because people often look at science as something that only happens in a lab, but for her, medical science is the reason she’s able to live her life more to the fullest.”<\/p>\n

So Vazquez crafted a scrapbook-style video about Ava, who is now 15 and also lives in Cape Coral.<\/p>\n

“I looked at videos on how to make a compelling video and I got really involved into Canva,” she said. “And I ended up creating that video and I wanted it to feel warm, which is why I went with the paper scrapbook style of it and it allowed me to tell her story like a family album and blending memories and with science animations.”<\/p>\n

Vazquez will use the $10,000 toward her education at Florida\u2019s Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, where she\u2019ll study aviation.See her video and runners-up from hundreds across the country, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elyssa Vazquez of Cape Coral saw a notice on TikTok about a scholarship contest, entered and won. Vazquez,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":289524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-289523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}