Six JHop students are off to Tallahassee to show off their research skills in the Florida History Day State Contest.

Eighth-graders Aurora Catalogna, Levi Perry, Taitum Newalu, Ai Vy La, Myla Bonczek-Harper and Harper Bush will travel May 3-5 to state capital to present their projects.

Florida History Day is an affiliate of National History Day, a nationwide competition where students can work individually or in a group to create exhibits, websites, documentaries research papers or performances.

World history teacher Tracy Newman said that this year’s crop of contestants is the best she has seen.

“They had the most fun topics,” she said. “They had the most engaging projects. This was our strongest year so far.”

Catalogna worked with Perry on a website about journalist Nellie Bly, who spent 10 days investigating a mental asylum. She said that Perry was a great partner for their project.

“He just wanted to do a website because he was familiar with working with that stuff,” she said. “I picked the topic, which was Nellie Bly, and he picked the website, so we just worked perfectly together.”

Eighth-grader Harper Bush chose to do an exhibit on the astronomer Vera Rubin.

Rubin was an astrophysicist, who worked in dark matter and studied the rotations of galaxies. She revolutionized women in the staff field of science, Bush said.

Bush said that she enjoyed creating the project.

“It was fun creating small-scale models of dark matter and the Rubin Observatory,” she said.