National History Day
June 15, 2018What’s National History Day (NHD)
Despite what the name suggests NHD isn’t a national history holiday, but a national competition held annually. The competition revolves around making a history project based on a yearly theme. These projects can be of several categories: documentaries, exhibits, papers, performances, and websites. These categories are further split into junior (middle school) and senior (high school) divisions, and group vs individual projects. Students compete at the regional, state, and national level each year. At the competition you present your project to a panel of judges in the first round, and the following rounds depend on the category and level of the competition. Those who place 1st and 2nd move onto the next level.
Experience
I personally competed for five years in the group website category (junior and senior division) with some of my friends. Every year we placed 1st at the regional level, in three of those years we placed 2nd at the state competition, and as sophomores we placed 3rd at the national level (see senior group website winners). Not to brag, but that was the first time students from our region placed at nationals in a long while (the following year multiple people placed at nationals… we don’t talk about that). Nonetheless, it’s safe to say that my group of friends and I became fairly adept at building websites, at least those that are historically themed.
Coding
Although NHD websites had to be built in Weebly, judges would often be impressed with custom code. In my group I was the only one who knew how to code in HTML/CSS/JS so it was my job to make something unique that’d impress the judges. From simple stuff like fancy buttons, to more complex code like interactive maps, I developed a lot for NHD. Considering the competition was essentially an annual thing for me, I ended up getting plenty of practice with web coding. Unfortunately my group never saved our past websites, but I did manage to find our national winning site on an unsecure Weebly server. Admittedly our theme seems to be broken, and my custom code along with it.
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