Complete State Contest Information: Read, Learn, Pass It On

This post contains information you need to ensure a successful and enjoyable Washington History Day state contest. Please read it carefully. We are looking forward to welcoming all 1,500 of you at Bellevue College on Saturday, May 1.

ARRIVAL: For directions to Bellevue College, click here. If you are coming from the south, please note that I-5 is undergoing major construction and significant delays are predicted. Go to the WSDOT website to learn more about specific closures, and plan your travel time accordingly. At the very least, you should plan to be on campus one hour before your judging time.

When you arrive on campus, proceed to the registration tables in the lobby of the Gym (see campus/parking map). We suggest you park near the Gym, since that is the venue for the awards ceremony (the last event of the day), in lots 16, 17, or 18. Do not park in the parking garage, as it will be closed. Please refer to the attached campus/parking map for additional parking options (lots 6, 8, 10 and 12 are good options).

REGISTRATION: Students and teachers EACH need to pick up their own registration packets at the check-in tables in the Gym lobby. Please allow enough time to do this; your packets contain everything you need for the day. If you have outstanding fees, your registration will be held in contest headquarters so that payment can be made. Registration is open Friday night 5-8:30PM, and Saturday morning 7-10:30AM (after 10:30AM, registration moves to the lobby of Building C). This is also your chance to sign up for a campus tour (see below for details).

T-SHIRT PICKUP: If you pre-ordered a History Day t-shirt, you may pick it up Saturday morning during registration in the Gym lobby. Please remember to bring cash or check only. There may be a few extra shirts for sale if you didn’t order one during online registration.

EXHIBIT SET-UP: The Gym will be open for exhibit set-up on Friday from 5-8:30PM and Saturday from 7-9:15AM only. Do not wait until the last minute to set up your exhibit; the gym will close promptly at 9:15AM for judging. Students must set-up their own exhibit; adult assistance is allowed only for exceptionally heavy or awkward pieces. Contest staff will monitor the Gym to ensure rule compliance. Exhibit students should bring seven (7) copies of their title page, process paper and bibliography. Three (3) copies should be left with the exhibit just before judging begins on Saturday; judges will take these with them. After the preliminary round judging ends, students should return to their exhibits by 1:45PM and leave three (3) copies for final round judging in the afternoon. The extra copy is for emergencies—and there are always emergencies, so be sure to bring enough copies with you.

GENERAL SCHEDULE: The general schedule for the contest is available here (look under State/Helpful Information). Please print, copy and distribute as needed. The schedule provides important information about judging times and policies, meals, and public viewing of exhibits, websites and papers.

JUDGING: Exhibits, paper and website judging is closed to the public. Paper and website judging begins at 9AM; all other categories begin at 10AM. Paper and website students need no paperwork; the judges already have it. Exhibit students will be called in a few minutes before their judge time by a volunteer stationed at the Gym door. This is your opportunity to freshen the exhibit, fix any loose ends, etc. Judges will introduce themselves and usually ask students to wait for a few minutes while they read the paperwork and look at the exhibit. Then they’ll conduct the interview. Each judging slot is 15 minutes long.

In performance and documentary categories, audience is welcome to attend but may not ask questions. Cell phones must be turned off and talking should be kept to a minimum to ensure that every student is offered the same opportunity and respect. In the preliminary rounds, performance and documentary students are allowed five minutes to set up, ten minutes to present their projects, and five minutes to tear down. Judges typically ask questions during the last five minutes. Students in these categories should bring seven (7) copies of their title page, process paper and bibliography—three for the morning round, three for the afternoon round if they advance, and one for emergencies.

The final round judging begins at 2PM, and interviews are not conducted in any category; the project must stand on its own. Students present their performance and/or documentary, including time for setup and tear-down, but there are no questions. Audience members are encouraged to attend all rounds and to cheer on all students.

FINALS POSTING SITE: Performance and documentary finalists will be posted in the cafeteria (Building C, ground floor) at approximately 1PM. Students who are advancing to finals should note their presentation time slot and proceed to the appropriate room to prepare. Room schedules will be posted in Buildings C, L, R and the Gym for easy navigation; sandwich boards will be set up around campus as well. Paper, website and exhibit finals are not posted; winners are announced at the awards ceremony.

MEALS: If you signed up for meals, tickets will be in the registration packet of the person who paid for the meals. Do not lose the tickets; they are not replaceable and are your only means of access to on-campus meals. Lunch is served 11:30AM-1:30PM; dinner is served 4:30-6PM. If you did not sign up for meals, you may purchase them on site ($11 lunch, $13 dinner). All meals will be served in the Cafeteria, ground floor of Building C. In addition, the coffee shop in the lobby of Building C will be open all day; it features a full espresso menu and assorted pastries and snacks. Vending machines are available in most buildings as well.

CAMPUS EVENTS: Bellevue College and its History Club have put together a number of great events to welcome History Day contestants to campus.
- On Friday, April 30, the Netherfield Regency Ball will take place in the Cafeteria (Building C), beginning at 7:30PM. Participants may dress in 18th-century garb, or come as you are and try out the dances that Thomas Jefferson enjoyed.
- On Saturday, May 1, the History Club will lead four campus tours. Two will include an inside look at the planetarium, another will explore the physics lab, including a cannon demonstration, and one is a surprise. Tour capacity is limited, and students should sign up at registration, where times and rendezvous points will be posted.
- Also on Saturday, you’ll have the opportunity to meet with historians, librarians and archivists from around the state at the History Day Research Buffet, 2-5:30PM in the Cafeteria. This is a great chance to learn about different repositories and their resources, and get one-on-one advice about research.
- Watch for Bellevue College Television (BCTV) staff, who will be filming throughout the day. This is your chance to get on camera, show your project, and talk about participating in History Day.
- Also keep an eye out for our own History Day photographer, Gwen Schweitzer. She’ll be snapping pics throughout the afternoon.

AWARDS: The Awards Ceremony begins at 6:30PM in the Gym; doors open at 6PM. Sit with your teammates and cheer on everyone who completed a History Day project! Awards generally last 90 minutes. When awards end, only teachers may pick up packets with their students’ evaluation forms. Immediately after awards, the top finishers, their parents and teachers stay behind to talk about the national trip. This generally takes about 45 minutes and is absolutely essential.

CODE OF CONDUCT: History Day participants are guests on the Bellevue College campus and are expected to behave according to the codes of conduct of their schools and the NHD Rule Book. Contest coordinators may disqualify any student who violates this rule.

CONTEST PROGRAMS: Complete contest programs will be available for download from the Washington History Day website about three days before the contest. To keep printing costs down, we will not be offering printed programs this year; if you want a complete contest catalog, you should download and print it.

As always, if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Thanks, and happy History Day!

Screening a Documentary at the State Contest? Read This!

This came over the transom from our friends at New York State History Day, and it so perfectly mirrored our experience that we had to share it. So, doc producers, read up and make sure you're ready!

During the regional contests this year, many students brought their documentary entries as computer files. This seemed to be new development for 2010, and there were many issues with hardware and software compatibility. I want to take this time to clarify the procedures for the Documentary Category for the state and national contests.

The intent of this category is to produce a final TV-ready documentary in DVD/VHS format. To that end, both the state and national contests will provide only a television, DVD player and VCR on which students can show their projects.

However, students can show their projects on a computer if they bring the equipment with them (i.e. computer, speakers, projector.) This is in accordance with Rule 8 on page 19 of the National History Day Contest Rule Book, which states: "Students must provide and be able to run their own computers and software."

During the state and national competitions, each documentary entry is given a twenty minute judging period. The first five minutes enables students to set up and test any equipment. They then have ten minutes to present the project and five minutes for tear-down and questions.

Questions? Email us.

Regional Contests: Halfway There

Whew! Mark and I are running all over Washington, it seems, attending regional contests. We're thoroughly enjoying seeing old friends and meeting new ones, judging projects, and generally getting in the way of the fabulous regional coordinators.

On the way to Bellingham last week, History Day Advisory Committee member Gwen Schweitzer and I were talking about judging in general (she's a judging machine, having helped at two contests so far with more to come). Gwen had a great insight that I've added to my judging orientation, and I think it's useful for coaches and students, too.

She said she tries to differentiate between fixable and non-fixable problems when she's evaluating projects. For example, an exhibit with too-small font is fixable. A documentary that doesn't include brief credits for images and video used in it is fixable. A performance that includes too much background and not enough findings is, I think, fixable.

So what's not fixable? Well, the big one this year is a project that isn't really about an innovation. The Innovation in History theme is a challenging one, and we're seeing that at the regional contests. Most projects are about a physical innovation (the cotton gin, the microprocessor, blood plasma, unicycles). A few are about ideas (Communism, wilderness). And some are really about the innovator, not the innovation.

For example, a project that purports to be about the light bulb but is really a biography of Thomas Edison, or one whose title suggests it's about heart transplants but is really a profile of Christiaan Barnard. Be careful! It's tempting to focus on the individual, and certainly their background has something to do with the innovation. And we are a society focused on the accomplishments of individual people. But it's important to avoid this trap.

Projects should be about the innovation, not the person. And the theme ends with "Impact and Change"--so projects have to show both. How did it make a difference? Why was it important? What happened after the innovation came on the scene?

Whether you're heading into regionals or prepping for state, take a hard look at your project. Is it about an innovation? Does it show both impact and change? Can you express that in an interview with judges? And it is clear in your process paper? Ask someone else to look at it, too--friends, parents, teachers are all great sources of feedback.

Correct Bibliography Citations Are Important

Enjoy this post from guest blogger Jessica Ellison of Minnesota History Day:

Many students are using online citation programs, such as Easy Bib or Noodle Bib, to generate their citations. While these programs can sometimes be helpful as students assemble their bibliographies, there are certain flaws that can result in incorrect citations. For example, when using Easy Bib’s MLA style to cite a government document, the citation formula does not ask for an original date of publication. Students citing the United States Constitution, as found on the Library of Congress website, will be asked for the date the document was published on the website and the date the document was accessed, but not for the original publication date.

Be cautious of online citation generators. History Day rules require the bibliography citations to be in either MLA or Turabian style, and certain citations assembled online do not match either of these. In general, it is always a good idea to have students use the printed guides, “A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations” by Kate Turabian or “MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers” by Joseph Gibaldi, instead of using the online generators. It’s similar to the skill of telling time or doing long division; digital clocks and calculators are available, but students still need to learn how to read traditional clocks and do long division by hand. Additionally, the online generators seem easier, but in many cases it is more complicated than simply referencing one of these books.

If the books are not available at your school library, here are a few helpful citation guides online for Turabian and MLA.

Getting Ready for State

The regional contest season kicks off this weekend, which means that next week students and teachers will start registering for state. This year the state competition is Saturday, May 1 at Bellevue College. We're excited about this new location--it's a centrally located, easily navigable, compact campus, and the History Department is enthusiastically sponsoring the event.

But before you can get there, you have to register, and this year, we've moved to online registration for state (next year, regional contestants will register online, too). Registering online will allow you to choose your meal options, pre-order a 2010 History Day t-shirt, apply for special awards, and more. Go to our contests page, scroll down to "State," and read the information before you begin registering.

Please note that teachers must register before their students! For everyone, though, the process is the same: you'll create an account, choose a username and password, and be guided through the steps to register. As always, if you get stuck, contact us at historyday@wshs.wa.gov or 360-586-0165.

Oh, and once you're done registering? Get back to work revising your project!

Brief Credit or Full Bibliographic Citation? How to Choose, How to Use

Some colleagues and I have been talking about the correct way to use citations and credits in History Day projects. Particularly sticky, it seems to us, is selecting the correct form to use in a specific part of your project. In this regard, documentaries, web sites and exhibits cause the most hand-wringing among students, and the most aggravation among judges. So here goes.

Let's explore the concepts. The NHD Rule Book talks about using "brief citations, "credits," "full bibliographic citations," and "proper credit," for starters. It would be helpful, perhaps, to use one term to mean full bibliographic citations (the kind you use in your bibliography that help other researchers locate sources you used) and another term to mean brief credits, or what you use to indicate how viewers can find the full citation. So that's what I'm going to call them: full bibliographic citations and brief credits. The latter is essentially an abbreviated version of the former and helps viewers figure out where to look in the bibliography.

The question is what concept should be applied at what point in the project. In a documentary, for example, those brief credits should appear throughout, whenever you use something from another source. This includes pictures, film, art, slides, interviews, etc. Let's say you have an interview clip with Bill Gates as part of your documentary. When he appears onscreen, text that identifies him should appear at the same time: Bill Gates, CEO, Gates Foundation (or something like that). And that brief credit needs to be visible long enough to be able to read the whole thing. In the bibliography, I'd expect to find a full bibliographic citation of a personal interview with Bill Gates.

(Documentaries have the added requirement of a general credit list that rolls at the end of the piece. These often zip by so fast that they're impossible to read, a victim of students' desire to get the most out of their 10 minutes. But they really need to meet the same standard: displayed long enough to be readable by your average viewer. See Rule 6 [page 19 in the NHD Rule Book, rev. 2009/2010] for this category for further explanation.)

You need only display enough information in the brief credit to allow viewers to find the source in your bibliography. Or, put another way, you have to display at least enough information in the brief credit that viewers can find the full bibliographic citation in your bibliography.

Similar rules apply for exhibits. In the actual exhibit, a full bibliographic citation would be confusing, wordy and distracting. But you have to give brief credit for images, timelines, quotes, etc., so viewers know where to find the sources in the bibliography. So if you use an image of Chief Seattle that you obtained from the digital image collection of the Washington State Historical Society, I would expect a brief credit that reads something like, "Chief Seattle, courtesy of Washington State Historical Society" (providers of such sources often required specific credit language, so keep your eyes open for that). And then I would expect to be able to go to the bibliography and find the full bibliographic citation for that image. (You could also, it's worth noting, give the brief credit in the image caption; e.g. "This image of Chief Seattle from the Washington State Historical Society shows the dress typical of Duwamish leaders in the mid-19th century.")

And how about websites? Same rule applies. Let's say you use a video clip showing Thomas Edison working on the light bulb in his lab. Users have to click to view the video, so I'd include the brief credit right at that spot: "Click here to view Thomas Edison at work in his lab, courtesy of the Thomas Edison Museum and Archives." And--you know what's coming--I'd then expect to be able to click the bibliography page and easily locate the full bibliographic citation for that video clip.

So this comes down to parsing the sometimes confusing terminology employed in the NHD Rule Book, and--more importantly--thinking logically about what information will help your viewers. To my mind, that means brief credits during the documentary, on the exhibit board, and throughout the web site, with full bibliographic citations available in the bibliography.

It's easy to get hung up on how a brief credit looks, so think about how you--a bona fide historical researcher--would like to see it if you were using the project as a source. In other words, think like an historian. It'll help you navigate the brief credit vs. full bibliographic citation maze. Let me know how you make out.

Web Sites: How to Avoid Trauma and Triage

Regional contest deadlines are rolling by, and I'm happy to see dozens of web site entries on a dizzying variety of topics.

I'm not so happy, though, when I get a web site URL that has problems. Here are the two biggest issues we're seeing:

1) The web site was not constructed at the NHD Weebly Portal. A number of students have gone to weebly.com directly, set up an account, and created a web site. They're lovely, they're interesting, but they're not rules-compliant. How can I tell? The sites constructed through the NHD Weebly Portal all have numeric URLs, something like http://12345678.nhd.weebly.com.

If your site has a descriptive name--http://laurenssite.nhd.weebly.com--you didn't go through the portal. In which case I have good news and bad news for you.

The good news is that it's not too difficult to reconstruct your site at the NHD Weebly Portal. Go to www.nhd.org, and click on "Start Your Web Site Entry at the NHD Web Portal." This is the only way to create an NHD web site. Really.

The bad news is that you have to recreate your site from scratch. Regular Weebly sites can't be copied over to the NHD Weebly Portal. I've heard from students in this predicament, though, that reconstructing their sites wasn't too bad.

So double-check: look at your web site URL. If it's numeric, you're probably safe (read number 2 below to be sure). If it's not, create a new account at the NHD Weebly Portal and reconstruct your site there. It's the only way your site can get evaluated by judges.

2) Sites aren't published. When you create your web site using the NHD Weebly Portal, you spend lots of time constructing it. When you're ready to take a break, you click in the upper right corner of the screen: either "Publish" or "Close." You must publish the site in order for it to be viewable (by your teachers, your friends, History Day judges). Publishing saves your work, too.

So don't just close your site when you're done working on it; publish it! And don't worry: the numeric URLs that identify NHD sites mean that it's highly unlikely anyone will stumble across yours.

Let's review: Your eight-word mantra for web sites is, Use the NHD Portal and publish your site. Now go check that you're doing it right!