Acuity Makes History Easier
for National History Day
Getting 700,000+ students across the U.S. excited about history is becoming substantially easier, thanks to web-based software from Acuity that will allow teachers and their students to register online for National History Day, a nationwide academic competition that culminates in a national championship each June at the University of Maryland. 
"National History Day is thrilled to be offering each of our 53 state and territorial affiliates with web-based tools to manage every aspect of their district, state and national-level events, from registration to scheduling, scoring and reporting results at each level of competition," explains Dr. Cathy Gorn, NHD Executive Director. "Like most academic competitions, many of our affiliates' budgets are tight and their staffs are small, and so our objective is to streamline those labor- and time-intensive administrative functions that challenge each of our State Program Affiliates." National History Day turned to Acuity Marketing Communications to help create a system that could manage its multi-level, multi-category competition, beginning with local district contests through state finals, and then on to the NHD national championships.
"Developing a system that would work well on all those levels, and would be easy for teachers, students and their parents to use, was an exciting challenge for us," says Rick Dreves, Acuity CEO. "We've prototyped and tested three versions of our RegistrationManager™ and CompetitionManager™ software, and have now combined the best features of each release into a solution that will streamline NHD's operations, allowing National History Day to engage more students, much more efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before."
The combined RegistrationManager and CompetitionManager systems enable NHD to streamline event registration, competition scheduling, judging/scoring and time-sensitive reporting of competition results. Students register online at the local level, and the system carries their information through each level of competition to the national level, allowing them to pay contest fees along the way and schedule their travel arrangements. Once captured, officials can use that information to pre-schedule the entries, and enter judging scores directly into the system, enabling near-real-time turnaround of results.
"The ability to quickly and accurately collect, tabulate and report scores makes all the difference in how students, their parents and teachers perceive the quality of such a competitive event," Dreves noted.
Other key capabilities of the RegistrationManager and CompetitionManager systems include: Collection and validation of school, student, parent, teacher and event volunteer information; tracking and managing contest entry data, including all scheduling and scoring; management of student participation authorizations and online fee payments from parents or teachers; automatic layout of award and participation certificates; and a variety of day-of-event custom reporting tools most needed by event administrators.
National History Day engages students in grades 6-12 in the process of discovery and interpretation of historical topics. It began as a small, local contest in Cleveland, Ohio in 1974, when Dr. David Van Tassel and members of the Department of History at Case Western Reserve University created a program to help reinvigorate the teaching and learning of history in elementary and secondary schools. Now based just outside of Washington D.C., National History Day engages more than 2 million people -- including students, teachers and parents -- at some level of competition. Students produce dramatic performances, imaginative exhibits, multimedia documentaries and research papers centered around an annual theme.
The projects are evaluated at the district, state, and national competitions; the top finishers in each of 10 divisional categories will advance to the next round. NHD has now expanded its services to provide workshops, seminars, and curriculum materials for teachers and summer internships for students.
The RegistrationManager and CompetitionManager software used by National History Day are two modules of Acuity's AcuWeb™ suite of online tools.
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