Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette Lake Linden 10th-grader Samantha Blake and Lake Linden teacher Jennifer Saaranen work to decode the handwriting of a 1762 will at an activity station during the local History Day competition at Michigan Technological University Wednesday.

HOUGHTON — Local high school students spent weeks researching everything from Calumet’s Italian Hall to the history of penicillin. Wednesday, they got to demonstrate not just what they learned, but what conclusions they drew from it.

The 21 students were competing in the regional History Day event held at Michigan Technological University.

This is the 50th year for the competition, which encourages students to explore history from the local to the global level. They can compete as groups or as individuals.

Students prepare exhibits around that year’s chosen theme — for this year, “Turning Points in History.” Topics Wednesday ranged from the Italian Hall to the discovery of penicillin.

“It creates opportunities for students to connect whatever their interests are with the national theme,” said Jonathan Robins, an associate professor at Tech and an organizer of the event.

The local History Day competition is sponsored by the Tech Archives and Tech’s Department of Social Sciences.

One goal is to get students not just summarizing what they find in a textbook, but synthesizing the information they find to present their own ideas. Those sources can come from online or other historical databases; some use the Tech Archives.

“The whole process requires them to take the topic they’re interested in and rather than just say what happened, to say why it’s relevant to this larger theme,” said Steven Walton, an associate professor of history at Tech and also an organizer. “It makes them think beyond just the facts.”

There are several ways they can do that. The most popular Wednesday was a poster board display. Students can also make documentaries about their subject, create a website, give a performance, or write a paper.

Most students are choosing outlets that will allow them to bring in artistic skills in other formats, Robins said. It also gives students a chance to present their research to people other than their teachers.

“They’re going to be judged by a group of people who in most cases they haven’t met, and so they’re thinking ideally about different audiences and best strategies for communicating in a way that a normal classroom setting doesn’t always allow for,” he said.

Some exhibits were particularly impressive this year, Walton said, including the first 3-D model he’s seen in the 10 years he’s helped run the tournament.

Madelyn Dudenas’s group made a documentary about MKUltra, a CIA project that used tested methods such as psychoactive drugs and electroshock to torture information out of people.

“We said it was the turning point in the trust of government because it was pretty much all underground until it came out,” said Dudenas, a 10th-grader at Lake Linden-Hubbell High School. “The CIA had destroyed a lot of the files on it.”

Dudeanas had been surprised to see the links between the government research and earlier experiments conducted by Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camp, including German scientists who were recruited after World War II.

The skills she learned in History Day will help when preparing for future projects, Dudenas said.

“Just how deep you have to go into research, and how important the primary sources are, and how to present it all,” she said.

Isaac Johnson and Brad Davis, both Lake Linden 10th-graders, drew on their enthusiasm for rockets. They put together an exhibit on the V-2 rocket, which began as a Nazi weapon and through scientists like Wernher von Braun helped power early experiments into manned space exploration.

Both said the project has helped them learn more about world history. Johnson and Davis culled research material from British, German and Australian archives. And they were already looking at how they could refine their project if they advanced to state.

“We can connect it to a local level,” Johnson said. “There were a lot of military bases, and they still have the silos around here.”

All of Wednesday’s students came from Lake Linden. Their teacher, Jennifer Saaranen, had competed herself when she was in high school. When she started teaching history, it was the first thing she incorporated into her planning.

“It’s a huge opportunity for students to not just have to present in front of peers, but to present to other adults who are interested in the topic and will give them their full attention and invaluable feedback,” she said. “There’s a revision process, there’s research involved, they get to choose a topic that is of interest to them.”

It fits with the ideas of influential educator John Dewey, she said, who promoted “that students ask their own questions and do their own research.”

When they weren’t talking with judges, students could look at the Keweenaw Time Traveler, a website and atlas that lets people document how locations have changed over time. In another activity, they could try to decipher a writing sample of a will written in longhand in 1762.

Some students will advance to the state competition, to be held at Central Michigan University in April. Winners there will compete at the national level this summer in College Park, Maryland.

Organizers hope to be able to regrow the local competition to something closer to the 100-plus students who entered History Day prior to COVID.

The most recent local student to go to Nationals went on to get an undergraduate degree in history, then earned a graduate degree in historic preservation. She now works at the state historic preservation office in South Carolina.

“It’s a wonderful trajectory in a historical career, that in some ways started through History Day,” Walton said.