I am a junior in high school, and I have to give a large history exhibition at the end of the year. As my topic, I chose to compare the POW camps following the construction of the Burma railway during WWII and the Hanoi Hilton, specifically the Alcatraz gang during Vietnam. I turned in my paper a week ago, I don't know if there is a way that I could attach it, so that you can read all 13 pages of it to get the idea of what I was going with. The dean of my school graded the paper, so hopefully it was well written and factual.
I took kind of a muckrakers approach, talking about the most scandalous treatment of POWs in both camps. I chose to talk about disease within the Japanese camp, and the torture techniques in Vietnam.
I have to present my project on June 6, to a panel of judges. I am allowed to invite more panelists as I see fit, but right now I think 6 will be present. The presentation is a maximum of 15 minutes. You have to branch off of the main topics of your paper to use as inspiration, so I want to go more in depth with facts about disease, working conditions on the railway, and torture. You then have to include a visual of some type, and close with an interactive activity that encourages discussion with the panelists. I want to make my presentation better than the other candidates, because we will be marked against a curve. I want to avoid using electronic mediums to present, because the panelists that I have talked to so far say that power points etc; all start to blur together. I want to use a lot of pictures for a visual, and then talk freely from my own knowledge. But I need help coming up with an activity. I had originally planned to just have a free flowing conversation with the panelist, but I want them to understand just how terrible these camps were. Perhaps something that made them feel like a POW would be interesting, but I'm not sure how to go about this. I don't know if sticking with the discussion plan is too boring, or if both activity ideas are completely worthless, and I need to start over with a new one. I have done no work on this thus far, so it doesn't matter what your answer is!