Knowlege Bowl, an academic question answering club and competition, is a place where students of differing academic skill sets come together to form a team and pool knowledge to answer difficult questions.
Knowlege Bowl competitions function in written and oral rounds. There are typically three oral rounds, which have three teams of four students competing to correctly answer each of fifty questions first. As questions are read aloud by a “reader,” participating students listen carefully and “ring in,” starting their fifteen second count-down. Students ring in as soon as they have an answer, or they know what the question will be asking so that they will be as early in the answering line-up as possible. When the seconds start ticking down, the team discusses in whispers until they have an answer, and the team captain answers aloud to the reader(s).
“I try to ring in as soon as I recognize what the question is asking and then I use the 15 seconds to come up with an answer if I didn’t immediately know it,” said club member Savanna Rowles (12). “I feel a little frantic, but I know it’s fine to not have an accurate answer, because we will not be penalized for incorrect responses. It is very common in competitions to not have a correct answer, or to only have a guess.”
The written rounds can have up to six team members, and each team is given a packet of sixty multiple choice questions and thirty-five minutes to answer them. Teams develop their own strategies and methods for ensuring each team member has a chance to look at every question, and for consolidating known responses and estimated guesses into final answers.
“My strategy is to give each of my teammates a different page of questions. We mark an answer with a circle if we are sure that we know it, a line if we think we know it, and a star if we are guessing. Each teammate goes through each page, and then we come back together to choose our final answers,” said Knowledge Bowl Captain Caroline Menna (12).
The Cascade High School Knowledge Bowl team currently has twenty-one members, consisting both of veterans like Menna, and of newcomers, like sophomore Ren Pobst.
Expanding my knowledge into areas that I don't really pay attention to most of the time is my favorite part of Knowledge Bowl.”
“I am enjoying my first year of Knowlege Bowl,” said Pobst when asked about his first year being part of the club. “I was expecting more scientific questions than we get: there are a lot about things like grammar and geography, which I was not expecting at all. Expanding my knowledge into areas that I don't really pay attention to most of the time is my favorite part of Knowledge Bowl.”
Knowledge Bowl members frequently cite the teamwork skills that they have acquired from working with students of all different grade levels and areas of interest. They also explain how they are better able to retain information because of Knowledge Bowl.
“The most difficult part of Knowledge Bowl is that it can be a hard pill to swallow when you realize just how much you don't know, but it's also a nice thought because it reminds you that the possibilities for what you can learn in the future really are endless,” said Menna.
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