KidsWorldFun Short Story Contest

Calling all young writers from around the world! It’s time to release your creativity and share your incredible stories with us. KidsWorldFun presents the ultimate Short Story Contest, open to young people of all ages.

Two Modes of Entry

● Free Entry: get the chance to win a certificate and have your story published on our website.

● Entry Fee of $10: get the chance to receive a cash prize as well as a certificate and have your story published. Payment links will be sent via email for these entries.

Amazing Prizes Await

First Prize: $100, certificate and publication;

Second Prize: $75, certificate and publication;

Third Prize: $50, certificate and publication.

Highly commented stories will also be published for the world to enjoy.

Contest Categories and Word Limits

To ensure fairness, we have set three categories for writers to choose from and minimum and maximum word limits for each category.

Submission Guidelines

● Include proof of age with your entry (scan or take a photo of your identity card). Entries without proof of age will be disqualified.

● Your story must be original and unpublished.

● Type your story out.

Our judges will evaluate each story based on content, language and writing style. Their decision will be final. For more information, please contact us at enquiry@kidsworldfun.com. We’re here to assist you every step of the way.

Don’t miss this incredible opportunity to showcase your talent and win amazing prizes! Enter the KidsWorldFun Short Story Contest today!

For sharks, the Mesoamerican Reef, which stretches over 600 miles, is a busy highway. Sharks use it to find their way and it provides them with food and habitat.

But as with on-land highways, this superhighway can be dangerous. Overfishing, commercial development and illegal practices are endangering the species. “We’re seeing a continued decline in shark populations. Our goal is to turn that round.” says Rachel Graham, founder of Mar Alliance, a non-profit organization focused on conserving sharks.

By monitoring sharks, Mar Alliance can collect important knowledge on the species to help inform conservation and push for political action. But rather than acting in opposition to the local fishing community, MarAlliance enlists their help.

“They are the ones who are on the sea every single day,” says Graham, “and they’re the ones who decide the species’ future.”

MarAlliance employs up to 60 fishermen across its range, mostly on a project basis, training them to collect data, record and release fish. Not only does this provide an alternative income to fishing communities, making them less dependent on natural resources, but it also teaches them about the benefits of a healthy ocean ecosystem and how to fish sustainably.

Among them, Ivan Torres, who used to catch sharks to sell locally as food, has learned how critical they’re to the whole ecosystem, saying he’d never fish sharks any more.

If this attitude change continues to spread throughout fishing communities, Graham has hope for the shark populations. “The primary threat to sharks is unquestionably overfishing,” she says, “By reforming the industry, populations can bounce back.”

In 2020, Belize outlawed the use of gillnets, large panels of netting of trapping large sealife. The ban’s impact is already noticeable with a recorded 10-fold increase in shark populations.

But such regulations need to be copied along the whole superhighway for long-lasting impact, and countries need to find a sustainable balance between fishers and the fished. “We need to find a win-win strategy between fisher livelihoods and shark survival,” Graham emphasizes. “I hope that through education and providing an economic alternative for fishing communities, MarAlliance will help ensure safe passage for sharks along the reef”.

Jimmy Jiang envisions a future where every house is powered by renewable energy stored in batteries.

Jiang and his team at the University of Cincinnati have developed a new battery that could have far-reaching implications for the large-scale (大规模) energy storage needed by wind and solar farms.

“Batteries store renewable energy for when it’s needed, not just when it’s produced. This is crucial for getting the most out of wind and solar power,” Jiang said. “Energy generation and energy consumption is always mismatched. That’s why it’s important to have a device that can store that energy temporarily and release it when it’s needed.”

They described their novel design in the journal Nature Communications.

Traditional car batteries contain a mix of sulfuric acid and water. While they’re inexpensive and made from readily available materials, they have severe drawbacks for industrial or large-scale use. They have a very low energy density (密度), which isn’t suitable for storing sufficient power needed to power a city. And they have a low level for electrochemical stability, which means they can blow up.

Water has a voltage (电压) limit. Once the voltage of such a battery goes beyond the stability window of 1.5 volts, the water can decompose into hydrogen and oxygen, which is explosive.

But Jiang and his students have developed a battery without water that can generate nearly 4 volts of power. Jiang’s novel design does so by removing from a battery the membrane, which is a huge component of upfront costs and accounts for as much as 30% of the cost of the battery. They invented a new type of energy storage material that improves performance at a lower cost. “Membranes are also inefficient. They can’t separate the positive and negative sides completely, so there is always crossover,” he said.

The group has submitted temporary patent applications. “There is still a long way to go, but we’re advancing toward a dramatic battery transformation in the next decade. I’m confident about that. There is a lot of intense research going into pushing the boundaries of battery performance,” Jiang said.

Imagine being an Olympic racer. Before stepping onto the track, you have to decide which pair of shoes to wear: One made from sustainable materials or a traditionally built model? If you’re like most people, you’d opt for the non-sustainable version. Consumer behavior research indicates sustainable products are often assumed to be weaker, less durable and perform worse than non-sustainable ones.

But are there instances in which sustainability is not a liability? To investigate this, researchers conducted a series of studies. They theorized that under some circumstances, sustainability may provide a halo effect, meaning that being perceived as sustainable also leads consumers to assume other positive characteristics about them as well.

In the first study, 595 participants were asked to make judgments about several household products like washing powder. The results suggest one’s values do play a role: People with higher environmental values viewed sustainable products as also being higher-performing, thus lending support for the halo effect theory.

The second experiment looked specifically at the effect of messaging, testing to see whether focusing the sustainability claims on the company, as opposed to the product, would be more effective in driving participants’ belief in product performance. 270 participants were asked. The results suggest that associating sustainability with the company has a much larger impact than messaging about product sustainability.

Study 3 sought to further expand these mechanisms by examining the influence of societal impact. 148 participants who saw various advertisements for products either described as having a “sustainable benefit” or “societal benefit” were more likely to see the products as being of higher performance if they were presented as positively impacting society, above and beyond merely being sustainable, supporting the idea that the halo effect is driven by the belief of the company as a moral agent engaged in socially beneficial behavior.

Contrary to previous thinking, this research illustrates that sustainability claims can produce positive belief about product performance in the above conditions. Like the track star, consumers often feel sustainability and performance exclude each other. When the brand (品牌) presents it just the right way, there doesn’t need to be a trade-off. These can be one and the same.