Students create History Day entries as competition nears

Juniors Andrew Chang, Alex Renda, Nikil Ramanathan and Mihir Iyer shave been working for the past few weeks designing a website explaining the significance of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The group has entered the annual National History Day competition and must complete their entry in early February.

From this year’s theme, Turning Points in History, contestants selected an event or topic in history using the digital resources the school has to offer to create a report that will be judged at the school level, then possibly at the state, county and national level.

“This is our first time entering the competition so we don’t have high expectations, but since the theme is extremely broad, it allows us to interpret our topic in a wide spectrum of meanings, which helped a lot,” Chang said. “Our group chose to do a website because this event allows us to work more easily, and we have experience designing websites.”

In order for the students to research topics, the school gave students access to a database called Newsbank, with primary source news articles, to add to the ones already available. Students are able to utilize articles that have been scanned from newspapers they were originally printed in.

“The new database allowed us to find newspaper clippings from the era about our topic, which helped us find images that supported our analysis greatly,” Chang said. “I'm pretty happy that the school used it because it saved us a lot of time.”

Using the research from the databases, the contestants created an annotated bibliography with primary and secondary source documents that was due on the same the as the entries: Jan. 28.

“We have gathered a great amount of material and a ton of sources,” Chang said. “We have books, newspapers, files from the National Archives, video clips and interviews with scholars.”

Once the bibliographies have been completed, contestants need to put together the entries in the form of a paper, website, documentary, performance or a 6-foot-tall tall exhibit. These will be displayed at the open house after being judged by various teachers during the next couple of weeks.

Selected entries will move on to the county competition at Castilleja High on March 9 and possibly to the state or national levels.

In the past years, Saratoga has sent a few students to the National competition in Washington, D.C., accompanied by history teacher Matt Torrens and librarian Kevin Heyman, but for now, the open house is the main focus for students.

“The [open house] is a showcase for the students to show off their hard work,” Torrens said. “Parents and members of the the community can come and see what rockin’ history students can do in Saratoga.”