STEM in National History Day

I was interested in which National History Day themes tended to generate STEM-related or arts-related projects. I had access to the full lists of national contest entries from 2016-2018 and the lists of finalists from 2011 to 2018. This post focuses on STEM-related projects.

The number of STEM projects at the national contest and in finals varies significantly from year to year, and it seems very tied to the topic. Topics that focus on the impact of a person or event (such as "Turning Points" or "Revolution, Reaction, Reform") lend themselves to STEM topics. The most common fields for STEM projects across years are medicine, environment, and disease, with space, nuclear, and other biology topics also common. This might be because of accessible resources on those topics or earlier exposure of students to them. No NHD category consistently has the most STEM projects, but performance often has the least.

Below the fold are more details on what I found. There are some notes/disclaimers about this analysis and how I categorized projects at the end.

NHD 2017-18: Conflict and Compromise

Here are some arts and STEM topics ideas for this year's NHD theme! I expect it to be a pretty low year for both arts and STEM projects; "Conflict and Compromise" isn't the easiest theme for either one. I'll be adding to this post for the next month or so.

STEM

-- The War of Currents (AC vs DC current). This has had a winner to an extent, but there are a lot of ways in which we still use each of AC and DC current today, so this does feel like it involved a compromise to me.
-- Wave-Particle Duality. I feel a little odd calling this a compromise, but the answer to "Is light a wave or a particle?" is well, yes. It took us a while to figure that out, and the history of the experiments and discussions that finally led us to the current model is really interesting.
-- Galileo. This was recommended in the theme book, maybe because Galileo compromised his values in recanting, maybe because he had earlier come to a compromise with the church (and then in the church's eyes crossed the agreed upon line). I'm hesitant to strongly recommend this topic because of its familiarity and applicability to a wide range of NHD themes.
-- Ethics of Human Subject Research. This is pretty broad, but it's a subject based on compromise. Biomedical and behavioral research is often very valuable, but we need to do it in a way that is safe and respectful of the people involved as research subjects. Key documents to consider: the Nuremberg Code, the Declaration of Helsinki, the Belmont Report, the National Research Act of 1974.
-- Munsell Color System. This paper argues that Albert Henry Munsell's system of describing color was a compromise that largely resolved a conflict around color science. It might be difficult to use this paper as a starting point; either it makes the argument you want to make, or you effectively argue against it. But this seemed interesting, so I wanted to throw it in.
-- Endangered Species Act. The ESA has existed in several forms and has been amended a number of times, generally seeking compromise between industry and protection of species.
-- Echo Park Dam and Glen Canyon Dam. Glen Canyon Dam was the compromise after there was controversy about the proposed Echo Park Dam, which was on protected land. (There are also similar other projects that you could look at; I found an Army document about development of the Snake River titled "Controversy, Conflict, and Compromise: A History of the Lower Snake River Development.")
-- Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. This park includes less area than originally planned because of Native American (especially Ojibwe) activism advocating for their land rights. There are probably other cases of preservation or conservation movements and Native American land rights coming into conflict that you could look for.
-- Cooperative Game Theory. So this is a kind of sideways take on the topic, but cooperative game theory is a mathematical field founded on ideas of conflict and compromise. Looking at its history (and in particular the early work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern) would be really cool and, I think, unique.

Arts

-- Ballet in the early Soviet Union. In the 1920s, there was a lot of discussion in the Soviet Union around ballet as an art. It had a strong history in Russia, but it was tied heavily to the nobility and especially to the tsars. It was virtuoso and didn't tell stories of the common people... but the classical, Imperial-era ballets still drew huge crowds. I think one could do a good project about that conflict and how the leadership eventually reconciled ballet with socialist ideals. Book recommendations: Swans of the Kremlin, Apollo's Angels, Bolshoi Confidential.
-- An Actors or Writers Guild strike; there have been several large ones in the US over the past century. Most labor negotiations involve a lot of conflict and compromise, and some of these have had major impacts on the affected industries. (I'd recommend against the Disney animators' strike because of the minimal compromise involved.)
-- Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. Maya Lin's design for the memorial was controversial, and more traditional memorial elements were added to the plans as a compromise.
-- Rodgers and Hammerstein. This is suggested in the theme book, and the reasoning isn't entirely clear, but here's my best guess. Several R&H shows have liberal political messages but don't fully commit to them. (South Pacific has a good deal of uncondemned Orientalism while also addressing racism and interracial marriage, for example.) Robert Gordon's The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies definitely refers to this as a compromise.

Math and Education Links

Here's some of what I've been reading over the past few months!

DeanDad on active learning.
I took an inquiry-based (pretty strictly Moore Method) course the semester that I was in Budapest, and I remember the professor telling us that any course that was very inquiry-based needed to be opt-in. He'd taught IBL Calculus at UChicago, where it was one of several options; it wouldn't have worked if it had been the only choice (even with the right class sizes). Some of that is because of what DeanDad talks about here. Active learning can be really empowering (as Francis Su talked about at the IBL conference in August), but it can also feel like abandonment, and I've seen it go both ways.

Modeling as creative science.
This is an article from earlier this year that Rhett Allain reposted this fall. After reading him for a few years, getting more experience doing mathematical modeling, and going to a conference that focused on using and teaching modeling in the classroom, I pretty much agree with Allain's focus on models. This particular post is about having students do the modeling work, which is really important; I also agree with him that there's great value in presenting information as models.

Using Student-Generated Examples.
This reminded me a lot of some of the problems that were assigned in my real analysis class, except there so often there was one type of intended example, and here that changes a lot by question (and variety is part of the point). What kinds of math classes does this fit into well? It seems natural for thinking about patterns and functions.

Ben Orlin does interesting things to the high school math curriculum.
I have an immediate adverse reaction to the Utility Belt Curriculum, and I'm not quite sure why. I love the Go Forth and Prosper Curriculum and would love teaching any of the 11th/12th grade courses, but as Orlin mentions, it's not feasible in most schools. I don't find Four Square Meals particularly appealing, partially because I don't really understand doing AP Calc AB and BC in two years, so I don't like the rationale. (Though yes please to it being normal for everyone to get decent stats ed.) I like the Verb-Powered Curriculum, though not doing some calc in the modeling class or circling back to modeling in the class that involves calc seems unfortunate. There's a ton of modeling that you can do without calculus, obviously, but so many modeling possibilities open with calculus.

Math with primary sources.
Could be good for integrating into math courses, for math history courses, or for history projects related to math topics.

National History Day 2016: Math, Physics, and Technology Topic Ideas

The theme for 2016 NHD is Exploration, Encounter, and Exchange History.

History of science topics tend to be underrepresented in NHD, so here are some math, physics, and technology topic suggestions for this year's theme! This year's theme is particularly good for scientific topics because so much of science is about exploration. The theme book encourages pulling in elements of all three parts of the theme, but it's not required, and it's natural for a project to focus much more on one than the others. This post might be updated occasionally throughout the fall!


Math and Statistics
--Paul Erdős and collaboration in mathematics. Erdős was hugely influential in combinatorics and graph theory in general but particularly in a few subareas like Ramsey theory and extremal combinatorics. More importantly, though, Erdős helped build collaborative networks in mathematics. He worked with many different people, connected people with each other, and connected people with problems that he thought they could solve. Read The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and watch N is a Number.
--Newton, Leibniz, and calculus. Newton and Leibniz independently developed calculus and then famously argued over it. This actually had consequences for the communication of mathematics between Britain and the continent for the next century, really negatively impacting British mathematics.
--G.H. Hardy and Ramanujan. Both men were incredible number theorists, and Ramanujan could see connections among numbers better than anyone else. Hardy discovered Ramanujan through letters and then invited him to come work in England. Read The Man Who Knew Infinity.
--Janos Bolyai and non-Euclidean geometry. Bolyai wasn't the first mathematician to explore what happened when we break Euclid's fifth postulate (about parallel lines), but his work was more complete than what had been done previously, and he did it independently. He wrote about this work in a letter to his father and said, "Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe." (Something from that quote would make a great project title!)
--Leonhard Euler. I could put a specific field, but Euler shaped a lot of how we talk about and write mathematics today as well as being extremely prolific in a variety of fields. There are so many possibilities here. Look at the biography Euler, Master of Us All.
--Augustin-Louis Cauchy and complex analysis. A lot of mathematicians believe complex analysis is the most beautiful subfield of mathematics, and Cauchy pretty much developed it all on his own. (Half the theorems in an intro complex analysis course are named after Cauchy.)

Physics and Technology
--The development of the theory of special relativity. Start with the Michelson-Morley experiment and move forward. This is an extremely well-tested theory, and the Michelson-Morley experiment which started hinting towards it was intended to detect aether...and failed.
--Quantum mechanics. There are a lot of possibilities here, and the whole story is really interesting, but especially in thinking about exchange the Bohr-Einstein debates would be a cool topic.
--The Einstein-Szilard letter and the Manhattan Project. Hungarian physicists and Einstein warned the US government that Germany might develop atomic bombs. The result was the Manhattan project.
--The space race. Some of the exchange is more a lack thereof, but this is definitely exploration.

National History Day 2015: Math, Physics, and Technology Topics

The theme for 2015 NHD is Leadership and Legacy in History.

History of science topics tend to be underrepresented in NHD, so here are some math and physics topic suggestions for this year's theme! Some of these might be a bit of a stretch of the theme or might interpret it in an unusual way. This post might be updated occasionally throughout the summer and fall.

Something I find cool about this topic is that the 'legacy' bit explicitly requires discussing the impact in the present, so think about all of these with that in mind! Another thing to keep in mind is something that is specifically called out in this year's theme handbook: not everyone who "leads the way" shows leadership. The handbook actually specifically calls out scientists: "Does a scientist display leadership because he or she invents something that is historically significant? Not necessarily." The people I've listed here did great things in their field. The question to consider is whether they displayed leadership, showing an ability to lead and inspire others.

Math and Statistics
--Paul Erdos and collaboration in mathematics
--David Hilbert's 23 problems
--Mary W. Gray and the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM)
--Charlotte Scott and women in mathematics
--Kuratowski and Polish mathematics
Choose a mathematician who helped create/made a lot of progress in an area of mathematics. Here are some suggestions:

National History Day 2014: Physics, Engineering, and Technology Topics

The 2014 National History Day theme is "Rights and Responsibilities in History!"

This is the second in a series of posts with ideas for NHD project topics. The first post, about biology and chemistry topics, is here (it's been updated recently!). This post will focus on topics in physics, engineering, and technology. "Rights and Responsibilities" is a theme that lends itself particularly well to issues of technology and privacy, as well as to ethics more generally. Some of these may be a bit too recent to make good NHD topics, and all of these topics should be interpreted with respect to the theme. Some of them may be strong in one of rights and responsibilities and strong in the other, but projects should try to incorporate both.

The list of topics is below the fold! Note that this may be updated from time to time.
Note: If you're looking for 2014-2015 ideas (Leadership and Legacy), go here!