“We were thankful for the opportunity to get experience performing in front of a large audience.” Tang’s group based their performance on David Sarnoff, a pioneer of American television. “We only performed a small snippet and there were some small technical difficulties, but we were glad we did it,” junior William Tang said. The award ceremony also contained many in-person presentations, including a viewing of exhibit boards, the group performance “David Sarnoff: The Visionary of the Television Frontier,” and a viewing of the first-place documentary “The Star of the Mythic West: The Man Who Broke Frontiers.” There was also a keynote address from history teacher David Hanna regarding his recent book about new American frontiers, Broken Icarus: The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Rise of Fascism. A group performance by Carol Hon, Dylan Ma, William Tang, Lucas McGarvey, and Vanessa Chen, as well as an individual performance by Toby Oluwatobi, will also be moving forward. First-place winners included Ivy Huang in the Individual Research Paper category Uma Sukhu, Medha Prasad, and Joy Cai in the Group Website category Anastasia Lee in the Individual Website category Britney Huang, Nozima Rahmatova, and Lillian Zou in the Group Documentary category Fiona Huang for the Individual Documentary Film Alan Chan, Zoe Chan, Abigail Jin, and Cindy Ye for the Group Exhibit Board category and Winnie Gao in the Individual Exhibit Board category.
In total, 32 projects were awarded in some capacity. These awards included Best Research Paper on Environmentalism, Best Project on LGBTQ+ Rights, and Best Documentary on a New York City Artist. “Students received awards not just for second or third, but also for like best artistic exhibit, etc., to encourage students to continue even if they did not place to advance to ,” Moore said. While only three projects were ultimately chosen to move forward for each category, Stuyvesant also presented honorary awards to recognize more participants. “We had many judges including Amy Schatz, professors, parents, and teachers,” Sandler said. While the award ceremony at Stuyvesant was only among the Stuyvesant community, a panel of judges has selected three projects from each category to move on to the city competition, which is happening in February at the Brooklyn Public Library. Students were tasked with creating a project on a historical topic of interest related to this year’s theme of “Frontiers in History: People, Places, Ideas,” which required over four months of preparation and research. NHD is a competition meant to encourage students to approach history in a creative and artistic way. The ceremony was organized by the Assistant Principal of Social Studies Jennifer Suri, and included performances, presentations, and documentaries by students from history teachers Mordecai Moore’s and Robert Sandler’s classes.
Stuyvesant hosted an award ceremony for National History Day (NHD) participants in the fifth-floor cafeteria on January 18.