How to prepare for the National History Bee Regional Preliminaries
The History Bee Meta-Game
Last week I wrote about the “Path to the World Championships” for the History Bee (note the correction in the post for those who read via email). This is the first in a series of posts where I will go into more details about what I have learned about the competition and how it changes at each stage or tier. In this post I explain how the regional preliminaries work and what that means for preparation. The next post will go into more general-learning territory with part two on my series on using AI to learn history.
Regional Preliminaries
The first stage of the competition is a written test, but the first face-to-face part of the competition is the regional preliminary. All the kids at the Regionals scored at least 50% on the qualifying multiple choice test, but that bar is pretty low. I expect most 9-year olds at the competition are not going to have encyclopedic knowledge of all events in human history. Without some sort of guard rails I would imagine the Regional Preliminaries would be pretty painful to watch and participate in as hardly any kids would get any of the questions right ever (and in some regions no one would get any questions right). But IACompetitions, the organization that oversees the tournament, has been pretty thoughtful about this. Here is how they solve the problem:
Study Guide: Each of the 80+ regional tournaments pull their questions from one of three “question sets”. Each question set has a “study guide” (Here is the RED Regionals study guide — the first regionals Everest will be competing in). There are 33 “things” in this particular guide (some “things” are more than one thing. For example, “Apartheid was a system of racial segregation in South Africa which was ended by F.W. de Klerk shortly before the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first Black president.” — that involves knowing, or at least being able to identify something about Apartheid, South Africa, F.W. De Klerk, and Nelson Mandela). My understanding is that ALL questions and answers for the preliminaries will come from this guide. This means that a kid can start “learning history” from scratch, but focus their learning and within a short period of time know the answers to every question asked in the Regional Preliminaries
Pyramid Structure: Recall that all questions in the History Bee are created in a “pyramid structure”. They start with relatively obscure facts about the event/place/person, and then get more obvious as the question continues. I assume “last sentence” in the question will be something straight out of the study guide. This means that while there is competition to identify the answer first, it should be relatively easy for most kids to know the answer to every question by the time it gets to the “last line”. Here is what a question for Nelson Mandela might look like at this stage of competition:
This leader co-founded the militant group Umkhonto we Sizwe, also known as “Spear of the Nation”. He spent 27 years in prison, 18 on Robben Island. While in prison, he wrote much of his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. He shared a Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk. Upon his release from prison in 1990, he became the first black president of South Africa in 1994. For the point, name this anti-apartheid leader who is celebrated for his fight for racial equality in South Africa.
Five-and-done: There are 30 questions in each preliminary round (or maybe 25? I have seen both. The documentation is contradictory. Maybe it changed from last year?). Once a kid has answered five questions correctly, they have “won” the round, and no longer get to answer any additional questions. Competitors are given a score based both on how many questions they answered correctly AND, if they answered five correctly, how long it took them to get those five answers. What it means for fun and participation is that no one kid, or small number of kids, can dominate the competition and lock everyone else out.
Every kid at the regionals participates in three preliminary rounds of 30 questions each. That means the best kids will get to answer 15 questions correctly, and almost every kid who has done any sort of preparation at all will walk away having answered something correctly.
The IACompetitions website says “Typically 20-50% of students then make the Final Round to determine the Regional Champion in each age division”. Given that there will be a LOT of weak players in the preliminaries, many I expect will not have prepared much at all, I do not think it is particularly difficult to make finals. Whether Everest wins or places in the top three will really depend on what the local competition is like. I have heard from some people that the most competitive regionals are in the North East. But we will see in a few weeks!
How to prepare for Regional Preliminaries
In “How we do the work” I wrote about two possible strategies for the History Bee:
Learn the most basic thing about as many people and events as possible (i.e., the “last line” fact)
Learn the ~5 most important things about each person or event
One could go further along this continuum and add:
Learn 10-20 important things about every person or event (or more!)
What is the correct strategy for the Regional Preliminaries?
Given the existence of the study guide, the first step is to know the “one most basic thing” about the ~33 things on that list. The study guide even tells you what that basic thing is. If you can only know one thing about Attila the Hun to do well in the History Bee it is apparently, “Attila was the brutal conqueror king of the Huns who died of a nosebleed on his wedding night in 453 CE”. The study guide tells you what the last line will be.
The problem is that the study guide tells EVERY competitor what the last line will be. By memorizing the guide the kid will know the answer to ever question at the end of the question. They will be beat by all the kids that can answer BEFORE the end of the question. That might be okay! Since 20-50% of the kids make finals, it is very conceivable that being able to answer every question after it has been fully read, may be enough on its own to make finals.
Maybe.
Check back in shortly after November 9th when I see what happens at the actual event.
For Everest we are going far deeper than that. For everything that is on the Regionals List she is doing the following:
Watching or listening some sort of media about it (Youtube videos, Podcasts)
Reading some sort of content about it
Reviewing the top 5-10 things to know with me
Recording a short video for instagram sharing what she thinks everyone should know (This is very time consuming, both for her and for me. We are likely going to slow down on video production to making 1-3 per week, at least until regionals, so she can focus on learning more content with the time we have together)
Adding the 5-10 things into Anki cards, and reviewing the Anki cards daily on the suggested Anki schedule (more on that in a future post)
In practice runs she usually knows the answer upon hearing the first sentence of the question, so I am not worried about her making Finals. It is possible that she is going TOO deep into these topics, and instead she should be going broader to be ready to finals. But I think the current strategy is fine and will pay dividends later one when (if) she gets to Nationals.
The other open question in my mind is if she should be focused on aided or un-aided awareness. Should she know the answer to “What was the capital of the capital of the Aztec Empire?” or just the answer to “What Empire’s capital was Tenochtitlan?”. The second if far easier, and will LIKELY be enough for most questions at the regional level. But the former gets the knowledge more ingrained, and will be valuable at Nationals (I think). I am not sure what the correct answer is here. Please feel free to comment or reply if you have expertise in this area!
Next Tuesday’s post will continue the thread on using Generative AI, then next Thursday I will be back to explain what happens in Regional Finals (assuming something else doesn’t jump the queue in the meantime!)
Everest Era Instagram
Here is Tuesday’s Instagram post where Everest explains the first Gulf War:
Keep learning,
Edward (and Everest)