Knowledge Bowl is an academic team sport that puts schools against each other to see who knows the most about different topics. Arlington High School’s team has about nineteen members, which have competed in the state tournament which takes place in Wentachee three times in the four past years.
In Washington State the club covers topics like math, science, history, language skills, literature, music, geography, and current events. These topics are practiced during the teams practices which happens on Tuesdays after school at 2:35-4:00 in C114 and are advised by teachers Chad Duskin and Ben Mendro.
¨Knowledge Bowl is basically like competitive trivia, and we have different teams, and then we press a bar, and then we answer the questions for points,” member Carson Raz (11) said.
This academic club focuses on the ability of remembering facts, their practices help them with this by making them compete like.
“We get the room set up with the machine and the buzzers, and then Mendro or a señor duskin starts reading questions, and then when if you know the answer, you could buzz in, and give the answer and we should play like one or two rounds,¨ member Sunny Sweet (9) said.
Competitions for knowledge bowl happen at many different schools, and consist of many different rounds covering all types of topics.
¨We go to different schools and then we do basically the same thing we do at the normal meets every week, but it’s just we go around the school to different rooms with different people reading the questions. We usually play three oral rounds and one written round, each round has 50 questions,¨ Sweet said.
Similarities can be found between practices and going to competitions, Raz thinks these moments can be fun.
¨It’s lots of fun, we laugh about questions and we have snacks, it’s also a good place to meet different people,” Raz said.
High School is about learning skills and knowledge to go out and become an adult, this club focuses more on unknown facts and stuff you learn in school.
“We look for kids with lots of obscure knowledge, who aren’t afraid to show it off. Good Knowledge Bowl members are confident, slightly or maybe very obnoxious and outgoing and interested in knowing stuff,” Mendro said.
Our own Knowledge Bowl team recently went to state, placing twelfth out of fifteen teams. Sunny had a lot of fun and thinks he can learn from these experiences.
“We just didn’t buzz to give it. um early enough, and so we missed the point out that other people buzzed first, even though we had the answer I think we had fun though. We did pretty well, but a lot of the other teams were putting up a lot of competition with the buzzer and they buzzed really fast and they knew a lot of things,” Sweet said.
Going to competitions, learning fun quirky facts, connecting to new people is what Knowledge Bowl is all about.
“Add to the fun, especially for those who like trivia, showing off their academic knowledge, etc. Help you connect with people you might not otherwise connect with,” Mendro said.
