History Bee/Bowl Study Resources
What to use to prepare
Today’s post was supposed to be about how to prepare for the regional preliminaries, but late last week and over the weekend I had a number of people ask me what resources there are out there to help in preparation. I am trying hard not to make these posts too long (a tendency I have), nor post more than ~2x/week (so I spend time doing the work rather than just writing about it). So I am pushing the “How to prepare for Regionals” post to later this week, which will push “Generative AI Part Two” into next week.
I guess it is a good problem when there is too much good stuff to share!
Here is my current collection of materials we have found useful:
IAC
IACompetitions (IAC) runs the History Bee. The first place to start is with the material they provide.
Study Guides
A collection of all the study guides from 2022 to present
Every regional prelim has a study guide of the material that will be tested at that event. There are three “colors” per year — three different question sets so kids can in theory participate in three different regionals. There are also three sets of questions for bowls
Here is the guide for this year’s RED regionals (the other two colors have not been released yet)
Here is the guide for this years “C” Bowl Regionals (B and A will be released later this year). Note there are only ~2-3 overlapping questions between the Bee and the Bowl
The European division of the History Bee has put out their own guide that gives a priority order on “everything” participants should know
IAC has also collected other resources and indexed them onto a single page:
National Capitals Study Guide — prioritized into five groupings (which is a nice way to learn these! Everest has mastered Level 1, doing okay with level 2, and I have started seeding in a handful of Level 3 into her Anki)
Old questions
Elementary/Middle School Bowl (Regionals 2019-2021, Nationals 2018-2022 + Nationals Finals 2023 and 2024)
Elementary/Middle School Bee (Regionals and Nationals 2018-2022, Nationals Finals 2023 and 2024)
Hexco
Hexco is a tutoring company that seems to specialize in preparation for the National Spelling Bee, but they have a ton of more general resources, including some focused specifically on the National History Bee:
Free preparation guide (very good place to start)
For purchase materials “History Essentials”, more detailed “History Snapshots: USA 1900-1949” and “History Snapshots: “Europe and Ancient World” (we own these. All very good. I wish they had more than just the two snapshots)
A personalized 1:1 coaching program ($3100 for 32 weeks, one session every two weeks. Claims that 2/3rd of their students WIN their regionals, 70% make national quarter-finals, and 50% to the semi finals. In 2019 their students won HALF of all the divisions of History Bee at Nationals. The claim of the kids who have gone through 2+ years of coaching, 100% made at least the quarterfinals at Nationals). We do NOT plan on doing this, but I think this is where Everest’s competition is going to come from… Note that the stats have not been updated since 2019, so it may not even be active anymore.
QBReader
QBReader is, as the name suggests, focused on quizbowl. They have created a database of (all?) the old questions from quizbowl and made it searchable, playable, and provided access for analysis. Note that this is for QUIZBOWL, not History Bee. But they seem to be sister-type organizations. They both use similar question styles and seem to cover similar content. You can filter QBR to just provide information about History questions at the Middle School level (no option for elementary). Here are the two tools here I have found most useful:
Frequency Lists: I can pull a list of up to the 1000 most common to Middle School Quiz Bowl History Questions by sub-category (American, Ancient, European, World and Other), as well as other related categories (Literature, Arts, Religion, Mythology, Philosophy, and Social Science). This is very helpful for prioritizing study beyond the regional study guides. Top answer in each of the sub categories to save you a click (Middle School / All):
George Washington / Andrew Jackson
Alexander the Great (for both)
World War I / Charlemagne
Japan / Brazil
Aztec Empire / Carthage
Database: Once I have a topic I want to build a study-guide for, I can go into the searchable database and pull out pervious questions where the term I am looking for appeared. For example when I see “Brazil” on the list above the question is, “What questions are they asking where Brazil is the answer?”. Here are two examples at the middle school level:
This is the largest of the countries that won the War of the Triple Alliance. This country was led by two emperors named Pedro, the second of whom abolished slavery with the (*) Golden Law. The Cry of Ipiranga declared this country’s independence from Portugal, and in 1960 it moved its capital from Rio de Janeiro. For 10 points, name this country whose modern capital is Brasilia.
The current president of this country and her predecessor Lula da Silva are members of this country’s Workers’ Party. That president, Dilma Rousseff, was reelected in 2014 despite concerns about the high cost of hosting the 2014 World Cup and now faces impeachment charges. Environmentalists oppose construction of the Belo Monte Dam in the Amazon Basin in, for 10 points, this South American country home to oil company Petrobras.
The other use for the database is to get an idea of all the types of hints they provide for a given question. For example, I would not be surprised if there is a question this year where the answer is “Ukraine”. The final line is likely about the current war, but I can use the database to find what the competition is likely to mention earlier on in the clue. My bet is the four most important clues to associate with Ukraine are:
Chernobyl
Holodomor famine
Orange Revolution
Russia annexing the Crimean Peninsula
This is not rocket science, and I expect a little bit of thought would have generated the same list, but I may have missed the Holodomor famine in my personal “thoughtfulness”.
NAQT
National Academic Quiz Tournaments organizes the Quiz Bowl tournaments. Most of the material they have is for sale, and I have not purchased any yet. They sell frequency lists (not sure how they are any better than the free ones from QBR), practice questions, buzzer systems and a few study guides. They do have one free tool I like:
You Gotta Know: This is a monthly blog (with archive going back to August 2020) of “what you should know” about “something” every month. This includes things that have nothing to do with history (organelles, animal phyla, types of computational problems, etc), but there is a lot of history here, for example:
If AI did not exist, “You Gotta Know” would be amazing. But ChatGPT can basically generate the same lists, and do it for anything you want, rather than limiting to the one per month from NAQT. But this is a nice place to start for things you didn’t think to think about.
YouTube
There is a ton of history content aimed at kids on YouTube. I was even told that question writers know that elementary kids prepare using the material from the most popular sites, and so they write questions directly for those kids (so they feel like their learning paid off — at least in regionals). Some of the channels we have used:
Oversimplified: This is Everest’s favorite. We will likely watch all of them. There are only 32 videos all <15 minutes
CrashCourse: I like this one. It has a more extensive library that Oversimplified
Extra History: Apparently this one in particular is used by the writers to make new questions. A Reddit comment: “That how the “Robert Walpole” answerline got so much more common” (I do not know who Walpole is, but I guess we need to add him to the list). It has a TON of videos.
Some others: Overly Sarcastic, See U in History, and here is a more complete list that the Bloomington High School put together.
Podcasts
Most history podcasts for adults cannot keep her attention (or more importantly the attention of her siblings, who are often in the car with us). They also tend to go into TOO much detail to be very efficient. I have found these three to be excellent though:
Greeking Out: We have been listening to this one for a long time. Excellent production from National Geographic and it does not dumb things down. Clearly only useful for mythology (and mostly greek mythology at that)
Hosmeschool History: From the BBC. It only has 20 episodes but they are all great. Just the right level. And they have a quiz at the end. I tell the kids they will get $1 is they can answer all five questions correctly. They pay attention!
History Storytime - For Kids: A dad and his two daughters created this excellent weekly podcast from November 2018-July 2022. Episodes are about 10 minutes and very engaging. They cover just enough to get the main facts, and there are enough of them to last longer than Homeschool History.
Presidential: I like this one. It will be beyond her siblings, but we have a long drive coming up without the siblings where we may give it a try.
Study.com
I have not pulled the trigger on this site yet, but it looks pretty good. For $30/month you can get a “teacher plan”. It does not have the testing and quizzing materials, but it has what you really need — “bite sized video lessons”. Not sure if it will be any better than Oversimplified (I am guessing not), but it has a very extensive library if we are looking for an obscure topic. I will report back if we end up using it.
ChatGPT/Claude
As discusses in last week’s post, this is the ultimate tool. Maybe next week I will get to Part 2 on how I am using it.
Anki Cards
This is a super power. It will also get it’s own post in a couple of weeks
Everest’s Video
Everest is now posting a video per day (-ish. I missed this past weekend) explaining a historical event or person. She is getting better at it. She really got better when we changed the format slightly. The first post in the new format won’t be for about a week (The Spanish American War). I will be sure to share that specific video in the first post here after it goes live. So far she has published explainers on:
Vietnam War
Here is the latest (Vietnam War):
Keep Learning,
Edward (and Everest)