The smart training technologies include several parts. Their joint use allows making students of technical higher educational institutions interested in studying history. This article describes the experience of involving students of a construction university in research activities in history classes, when studying the topic of the Great Patriotic War. The first stage of the work involves the study of the student’s historical memory, the students’ perceptions of this war through direct communication of the professor with students, the integrated use of sociological, linguistic, pedagogical, psychological methods. In the framework of a continuous survey of 346 students, an expressed emotional coloring of the image of war in the student consciousness and solidarity of students in the need to preserve the memory of the war were revealed. Students classified the written and oral stories of the contemporaries, primarily their relatives, as the most reliable sources on the history of the war. Given the influence of the family war memory, professors form students' interest in research activities. At the next stage, an individual strategy for writing a family history of wartime is developed for each student; recommendations are given on working with databases, information available on the Internet, family and state archives, libraries.