10-04-2025
Olentangy student wins first place in documentary contest
POWELL, Ohio (WCMH) — Each year, C-SPAN holds a competition that allows middle and high school students to try their hand at documentary making, and a student in central Ohio took home one of the top prizes.
Out of the nearly 3,500 students who entered C-SPAN's StudentCam competition this year, Olentangy Liberty freshman Ben Kurian was announced as the first-prize winner of the High School Central division.
His film 'The Road to Vision Zero' is about using artificial intelligence to enhance road safety. It's just seven minutes long, but Kurian fit a lot of content into that short amount of time.
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'Over the past few years, we've been seeing an increase, really, in these road traffic deaths, and not much has really changed about the way we address it,' Kurian said. 'So I looked at potential solutions and saw that AI held some transformative potential.'
Kurian ended up talking to ten different experts about AI and preventing traffic crashes, all while being a top student at Olentangy Liberty. He started working on the documentary around winter break.
'It was a really, I guess, busy two weeks for me trying to balance school coming back into session, and also those like ten whole interviews,' Kurian said.
Kurian picked the Vision Zero topic because he heard of too many people losing their lives in traffic crashes, and his research showed AI can be a very helpful tool.
'Currently we have more of a reactive approach, whereas we find crashes and then make changes after those crashes happen,' Kurian said. 'But really what we need is a more proactive approach.'
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Kurian said he got a lot of help along the way. His English teacher Aaron Rothey was his adviser in the competition.
'He asked me to look over it and offer any feedback that I could give him, so I watched it a few times,' Rothey said. 'I wrote down some notes, talked through the notes in the suggestions with him, and that was about it. It was really his thing.'
As a first prize winner, Kurian got $3,000. He said he's looking forward to people seeing his work.
'Vision Zero really starts with all of us,' Kurian said. 'We all need to make a change for this.'
'The Road to Vision Zero' will air on C-SPAN on Saturday, April 19, at 6:50 a.m. with replays throughout the day.
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