New Tech High students bring World War I to life

A student in olive-green fatigues and a dirt-smeared face crouched in the makeshift trench, cautioning his fellow “soldiers” to lay low: “Keep your head down — otherwise, you could get hit.”

The boy — Adam McCoid — is a freshman at Central Coast New Tech High School, and though he showed an admirable dedication to the statement, there wasn’t much risk of actually getting hit by any stray gunfire.

The war was, after all, taking place in the quad of the small Nipomo high school as part of its annual World War I Night.

“What I love is the excitement every single year,” said social studies teacher Samantha Millhollen. “The kids are so excited every single year to put this on for everyone.”

The annual event is the freshman history and English classes’ big project for the year. Students spend about seven weeks getting information on the conflict, also known as the Great War, and then planning interactive booths to explain their topics.

“We actually start out with the students interviewing their family members and community members to see if they know anything about World War I, or do they know very much at all,” Millhollen said. “What we find every single year is they get World War I confused with World War II, so that really sets up the why for the project: to educate the community, to educate our family members on this Great War.”

World War I was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914 and drew most of the major European powers into a massive conflict because of the vast network of political alliances at the time. The war would eventually spread around the world, with allies Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Japan and the United States fighting against Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. More than 9 million soldiers were killed throughout the span of the conflict, which set the stage for another world war a little more than two decades later.

Topics at Thursday night’s event ranged from trench warfare — several booths illustrated what it was like fighting in the man-made pits that offered little shelter from enemy fire — to how the countries across the world allied themselves. In the latter’s case, a large map with colorful tape showed how friends and enemies were connected during the first major war that involved most of the globe.

Another booth showed a bloody student lying on a stretcher next to an actual ambulance from the era — courtesy of the Estrella Warbirds Museum — waiting for medics in the British medical tent to operate on him.

Yet another booth had a Russian soldier encouraging passersby to enlist in the military, “if the cap fits.”

“What I really liked about the project was you got to create a giant booth,” said Riley Stewart, who dressed up like a Russian soldier as part of his booth’s topic on the use of propaganda during the war. “We may not have gotten a topic like a trench, but it was still really fun to create what our booth was going to be about and to print out a bunch of posters to show everybody and learn all the stuff to present to everybody.”

Stewart’s booth, which was close to the exit of the living museum, had an extra takeaway for visitors: registration forms so attendees could sign up for the war.

“It was fun to come up with a way to incorporate the audience into our booth,” Stewart said with a smile.

Millhollen said student excitement is the best part of the project and is one of the major reasons they continue to do it each year.

“This has been one of their favorite projects of the entire year,” she said. “They really get to showcase what they’ve learned and really show what project-based learning is, and what our school is about, at the same time.”

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 3:01 PM with the headline "New Tech High students bring World War I to life."