#COOLASSIGNMENT
Difficult Histories
The most amazing assignment of the year
Why: Because, for me it was my favourite assignment of the year and it might also help other kids who still have to do it, with finding for example, a good subject.
Written by: Anna Smeding, class T3E
At the beginning of this school year about 60 students from classes T3E and T3D had their first big history assignment. As for me, it was probably the biggest assignment yet. We had lots of fun, but it was also a lot of hard work. In this article you will read how this amazing assignment went, for me and for the other kids in my group.
Explaining the assignment
In the first activity week of the year we started our assignment, the explanation was simple, but the things we had to do weren’t. The beginning of the documentary was a stop motion video, which is about 30 seconds long. The rest of the documentary had to include all the necessary information regarding your subject and an interview of someone who knows a lot about the subject, or someone who has experienced something related to your subject.
The subject
Before we started making our documentary, we had to come up with a subject. Obviously the subject had to have something to do with history, but not just history, no a difficult history. A difficult history is a history which people still find embarrassing to talk about today, or just a very complicated event in history. Now you can think of all sorts of events such as, the Nazi’s, the ‘Jappenkampen’ and the VOC. We chose the so called ‘Jappenkampen’.
The start of the assignment
The start of our assignment included lots of research, when, where, who and a lot of important events. Once we had all our necessary information we started with our stop motion. We chose to use pictures and paper cut outs, so we started printing. We cut out all of our printed stuff and started taking lots and lots of pictures. When we had the pictures the editing began. After lots of work on our phones, because yes, we were allowed to have our phones, we had made an amazing stop motion.
Working after school hours
We had lots of time for this assignment, which was needed, the documentary was 5-10 minutes long. We had the whole activity week to work on it, but we also needed footage of the interview and other information in our documentary. All students got one day off at your own choice to work on it, for example to do your interview. We interviewed a family member of one of the kids in my group, he had actually been in the camps himself. We had to interview him in The Hague, so we had to take an 3 hour train to get there. Obviously we took the day off for the interview, because we knew we would need plenty of time. We had prepared our questions in the train, so the interview only needed to be filmed. We used my phone and one person asked the questions. The man we interviewed was very nice and we also had lunch, which wife prepared for us.
“I’ve never had such a fun and educational assignment, I really hope we can do more assignments like this in the future!”
Finishing the documentary
Then the editing began. We gathered all our footage, pictures, the stop motion, the interview and our voice overs. The editing probably took the longest of all we had to do, but it wasn’t hard. We used cap cut for the editing and we downloaded it once it was done. My group had a special group in WhatsApp, that we used for discussing things and sharing the first version of the documentary. After watching the first version we changed a few things until we were satisfied. The documentary had to be sent to our history teacher, but we also shared it with the man we interviewed and with our family members.
The competition
Once everyone’s documentary was finished, a competition was held in the mentor classes. We watched all the documentaries together and voted on a piece of paper. The documentary with the most votes would go to the next round and get a gift card for the school canteen. Two classes did this assignment, so it was up to the two last documentaries, the documentary that me and the rest of the group made and another documentary of class T3D. The day of the competition came, we had pies and soda. After both of the documentaries were watched, we voted again. We won!
I’ve never had such a fun and educational assignment, I really hope we can do more assignments like this in the future!