The Path to the History World Championship

How does the History Bee competition work?

NOTE: There is a correction at the end of the article that was not sent to email readers

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Welcome to new readers from StarCodexTen. I haven’t yet promoted this newsletter to my own audience at MarketingBS. Up until now I was only really writing for myself, family members and prosperity. There is now a little more pressure to eliminate typos, but I still want to keep this content casual. Thank you to everyone who has reached out with help and suggestions. Everest in particular appreciates it. She often starts evening conversations now with , “what did the strangers suggest today”. Thank you!

On with the show.

There is a lot I want to share about what I am learning with through process, but I feel I also need to get some of the base platform built first. In the short term my plan is to have roughly half the posts be about the History Bee itself and how it works, and half be about some of the things we are learning along the way (mostly about learning). The next post is going to be about how I am using generative AI in the coaching process. But first I want to lay the groundwork for how this competition we are embarking upon actually works.

The Path to the Championships

There are six stages to pass through on the way to the world championship. Kind of. Here are the stages, and how one advances beyond each stage:

1. Qualification Exam: Written online. Students are required to answer 50 multiple choice questions within 20 minutes. Candidates need ~50-60% of the questions correct to qualify for the regionals (the exact number apparently varies by year and the performance of other students). Students can write the test once every ~3 months if they fail to qualify the first time (IA Competitions, the group that runs the events, claims 40-60K students take the test every year). Without any preparation Everest wrote 4-5 practice exams from previous years and, with one exception, got 90%+ correct (On one of the old tests she got 80% correct). Many of the questions repeat from year to year.

2. Regionals Preliminaries: There are ~80 regional competitions across the United States (and many more internationally, but I have not spent time understanding that structure). There are three questions sets that are used throughout the year — Red, Blue and White. Students can enter a tournaments for each color set — so in theory a kid could compete three times in three different tournaments. There is at least one online tournament for each color set. I have no idea how many kids attend each of these tournaments. I have read there are 5-10 kids in each “room”, and there are separate rooms for each grade level (six grade levels for Middle/Elementary from 4th-8th grade). The Austin Regionals has three preliminary rounds, so that would mean 90-180 kids at the tournament — which in turn means ~7,000-14,000 across the country (~25% of those who completed the qualifying test)

3. Regional Finals: The first regionals Everest will be competing in is the Central Texas Regionals in Austin on November 9th. As mentioned, there are three preliminary “rounds”. I assume kids are assigned to one of the rounds? There is one History Bee Finals. My guess is that ~1/3rd of the kids competing that day will qualify for Finals. But I have not seen any documentation on how it actually works. This type of ambiguity is common for niche competitions (more on that in a future post).

4. National Preliminaries: Participants who score in the top half in their regional tournament qualify for Nationals. That may mean that even kids who do not qualify for the Regional Finals, still qualify for the Nationals. Clearly this is a low bar. My other daughter competes in long distance running, and half the kids at the state level are not going to nationals. But I assume that most of the kids who qualify for the History Bee Nationals do not end up going to Orlando anyway. The earlier estimate on number of regional attendees suggests 3500-7000 kids qualify for nationals every year, but Google tells me there are only roughly 300 kids at Nationals - so less than 10% that qualify choose to go. The National History Bee has been around since 2010, but it is clearly still at the stage where they can’t be TOO selective. In order for Nationals to be an “Event” they need to be inclusive enough that they there are enough people who qualify who ALSO choose to pay for the trip to Orlando. They set the bar at 50% and still only get 300 kids — about 50 per age division.

5. National Finals: Unlike the regionals there seem to be multiple rounds of elimination at Nationals. As far as I can tell from the schedule, it looks like four “blocks” of preliminaries (so maybe 12-13 kids in each block?), three blocks of Semifinals (maybe 50% of kids advance to semi-finals?), and then finals (~1/3rd of semi-finals candidates?). If you get to Nationals it seems you have ~20% chance of making the finals. [See correction on this below]

6. World Championships: The first World Championship was held in 2015 in Williamsburg VA. Unlike the National Championships the “International History Olympiad” does not happen every year. Post the inaugural event there have been competitions in 2016 (Honolulu), 2018 (Berlin), 2022 (Princeton, NJ), and 2023 (Rome). There was no Olympiad in 2024, but there will be one next summer in Paris. So roughly once every two years. Details are not available yet, but American kids need to come in top 25% in a US regionals or top 50% at Nationals to qualify. So in theory that is 1,000-4,000 kids qualifying from the US alone. In terms of attendance it looks like there are fewer kids at the World Championships than at Nationals (Rome apparently had ~200 kids). It would not surprise me if winning Nationals is a harder task than winner Worlds (this type of thing is also common in other niche competitions. Winning the Ontario Lifeguard Championships was generally considered a more significant accomplishment than winning the Canadian National Lifeguarding Championship)

If Everest does well enough we will know if she qualifies for the World Championship as early as November 9th. Stay tuned!

Whether she qualifies or not, our plan is to compete in all three Regional History Bee question sets. Luckily for us there is a Regional of each color within reasonable driving distance. In addition to Austin (RED Questions), she is planning to compete in Houston on February 15th (WHITE), and San Antonio on March 22nd (BLUE).

History Bee For Teams

History Bee for teams is called “History Bowl”. Everest is at a new school this year that is very small — the entire school right now has only 9 kids (Also the subject of a future post — the school will be doing History Bee as part of the core curriculum starting in January). There is only one other kid in her “grade” (in quotations because the school does not use traditional grades). The competition requires that all kids on a Bowl Team come from the same school, so we had ruled out her doing the History Bowl this year. But a loyal reader recently suggested two ideas:

1. You can’t compete DOWN an age group, but you can compete UP an age group. So she could have a team with the older kids in her school and compete in the Middle School division (there is a 6th grader and two 7th graders at the school)

2. A History Bowl team is up to four kids, but you don’t need four to compete. You can even compete in the Bowl as an individual

We have not decided what we are going to do yet, but I am encouraging her to to consider competing in the Bowl on her own (or with whoever else is willing to do it from her school). Updates coming.

That’s it for process this week. The next post is going to explore how I have been using Generative AI in the learning process. Then I will come back and dive into how the History Bee format changes from one tier of the competition to the next.

Everest on Instagram

After five posts explaining how the History Bee works, Everest has moved on to summarizing key events. This has been a great tool in helping her learn the material. So far she has recorded nine of these, and we have posted the first two. Here is the Battle of Hastings:

theeverestera2015

A post shared by @theeverestera2015

(Side note: I have really enjoyed using the newest MidJourney to create the covers for these images. I landed on a prompt putting a “blond 9-year old girl” in different historical situations or with different historical people. The only issues I have had is if I use the wrong wording. MJ doesn’t like putting a 9-year old girl “with” anyone, and it protests when I ask it to use modern famous people. I never found a way to picture a nine-year old girl in the same picture as Kim Jong Un — but Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were fine)

Keep learning,

Edward (and Everest)

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CORRECTION:

Regionals preliminaries consists of three rounds of 30 questions each. Players compete in all three rounds. If there are more than ten kids in an age the division, they are split into rooms of a maximum of ten kids each. Kids are shuffled to compete with different kids in each round. Based on total scores the top ~10 kids move on to finals. According to the website 20-50% of kids make the finals, which suggests 20-50 kids in each age group. With six age groups and 80 events, that’s 9,600-24,000 kids competing across the country in a given year (somewhat less than that to account for kids competing in more than one regional)