By Reagan Paz
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A quiz bowl team from MHS participated for the first time in the taping of the “It’s Academic Hawaii” high school quiz bowl against Mid-Pacific Institute and Punahou Schools on Oct. 29. The competition is a national high school quiz bowl that has aired in other states like Maryland and will be aired for the first time in Hawaii on KFVE in January 2012. Despite getting third place, they feel that they put their best foot forward considering they had less than two weeks notice about the bowl.
“I think for as little preparation time as we had, I think we knew quite a bit. We did pretty well considering we were against two of the best private schools in the state,” said Senior Sydney Blanke, a competitor in the game show.
A quiz bowl is much like a game of Jeopardy except it uses high school material. Since it was the first time MHS has participated in a televised quiz bowl, they needed to quickly put together a team and prepare for the competition.
They prepared by meeting twice a week and organized the team with an expert in a certain category like math, geography and science, and chose people who they thought would do well in the competition. However, since the questions asked at quiz bowls are mostly random, all they could do was try their best to prepare for the competition’s questions. “Well, you can’t really study too much because they’re facts based off of pretty much anything in the world … We get together, we practice previous questions that were on the program before and then we organize the team so that there’s an expert in one category,” explained Blanke.
Even though the participants knew the answers to the questions, they weren’t familiar with the buzzing system, which they felt affected their performance. “That was a major problem … I guess the buzzer system is, if (the buzzers) come in and overlap, it’s cancelled … until finally one buzzer comes in over another and then that one gets it,” said the Quiz Bowl team’s Adviser Mary Jean Fischer.
The National Quiz Bowl Association has invited MHS to host one of the competitions next year. Fischer hopes to start an official quiz bowl team for MHS by then.
