When we started on the national history day project we had many ideas to choose from. We met on mondays after school from 3:30 to 4:30 and sifted through ideas by deleting the ones that wouldn't follow the theme very well and the ones that would be too hard to find sources for. We eventually settled for sergei Korolev as he had broken many barriers and was very underappreciated in history.
We each took time to research for the project. We met during lunches to discuss our project. We used a book we bought called: “Red Moon Rising” to research and use its sources. We also used bits and pieces from online documents and articles such as an article by one of our states museums. The company that manufactured Korolev’s rockets is still going strong and we were able to use it for a lot of primary info on the rockets and pictures. We found out that Khrushchev’s son was still alive and had worked for United States museums and colleges. We contacted the cold war museum and they had one of Khrushchev’s friends email him to ask if he would do an interview. Khrucschev accepted. We were talking about the email Khrushchev's friend had sent us and one of the people who were helping us stopped said: “I know that name.” Turns out Khruchevs friend was the son of the man that was shot down during the U-2 incident.
There wasn't much that went into choosing our category, we just thought a website would be interesting. We worked at our homes or after school in the library. We first had to learn to use the very clunky website editor. Once we got a sense to how the editor worked we started actually working on the website. The 1200 word limit was a pain for us to overcome as there was so much we wanted to talk about. We had to leave out a lot about Korolev like his personal life. There were so many interesting things about him that we wish we could have included like how Korolev was a speed demon on the highway.
Our man; Korolev, is super relatable to the theme. Korolev most notably broke the space barrier by sending the first stalilite, dog, and human to space. Korolev also had many other smaller events that relate to the theme. Korolev was able to survive one of the worst gulags in Siberia, Korolev was able to become way more successful after being in a gulag, building Russia's first ICBM, and building Russia's first rocket powered aircraft.
Covid-19 thankfully did not interfere with the process of our website that much. We had already finished most of our project and competed in regionals before the virus hit. However, since we only met in person during lunches we could now not meet in person anymore. It was hard to communicate but the website still was able to be finished.