BUCKFIELD — The student academic fair at Buckfield Junior-Senior High School wasn’t the usual display of a history project.

Scattered throughout four classrooms Thursday night were such diverse displays as a website on the Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, a study of Pablo Picasso and his art, creating an energy-free refrigerator, a study of poverty in America, and many other colorful, creative and informative projects.

Donna Whitney, a social studies teacher, said the school decided to broaden its focus this year from strictly history, prepares students for competition at the National History Day event in Augusta.

“We opened it up to science, social issues, history and other subjects for all seventh- and eighth-graders. They worked an entire trimester on their projects,” she said of Research Night.

Each student chose a topic or problem and produced a solution, which included following the research process. They wrote thesis statements, took notes, made outlines and wrote an essay.

Eighth-graders Dennis Wescott and Jon Randolph, of Hartford, and Hunter Wiley of Buckfield put their heads together as well as their technological expertise to produce a website devoted to the Jewish uprising in the ghetto of Warsaw, Poland, in the early 1940s.

“We never knew about this,” Dennis said. “It was a big turning point in history when the Jewish people fought back.”

The students will enter their project at the State History Day competition on March 28, when nearly two dozen Buckfield middle and high school students will compete with schools from around the state.

The boys’ website is: 11824933.nhd.weebly.com

Eighth-grader Lauren Wilson of Sumner created another website on artist Picasso.

“He was really versatile. He had all kinds of different periods — blue when he was depressed, pink and vibrant colors when he was in love. He also created more realistic paintings as well as cubist,” she said.

Seventh-graders Abby Shields and Abby Fogg, of Buckfield, built a solar panel that can power a laptop computer and a car battery. Brian Kimball, an eighth-grader from Hartford, built an eco-freezer from an old, wooden Moxie box. Similar to the old-fashioned ice boxes, his “refrigerator” keeps foods cool with frozen bottles of water.

“I was surprised that it actually worked,” he said.

Poverty in America was studied by seventh-grader Sam Anderson, and Sidney Jackson and Noah Patenaude, eighth-graders from Hartford, discovered in their project on The Revolution of Artillery, that the catapult was first used 2,400 years ago.

“This has been a total team effort,” Whitney said. “All the teachers were involved in helping the students write research papers.”

[email protected]