January 25, 2018
By Jessica Karson and Jinhee Heo
The “Colony Collapse Disorder” team from Jonas Clarke Middle School was the champion of the 22nd annual LEF Trivia Bee. The event was held in the Lexington High School auditorium on Nov. 9.
42 teams of three participated in the Bee over the course of six rounds called swarms. The winners of each of those rounds, plus one extra lucky team who was randomly selected, participated in the championship round.
In previous years, the winning team would receive a gift certificate for winning. This year, the Trivia Bee organizers opted for a perpetual trophy to award the winning team to keep for a year. The winners of the 2017 Trivia Bee will have their names added this year.
“[The LEF organizers] are hoping [the Clarke teacher team who won the bee] will display it in Clarke for a year,” Caroline Yang, the co-chair of the Trivia Bee, said.
Other new additions were made to this year’s Trivia Bee which changed the style of play.
“Until last year [the Trivia Bee] had [a] format that is… if you don’t know the first two questions you are out,” Yang said. For this year’s bee, a system was put into place where “the team that answered the most questions right would move onto the final round instead.”
“[The most memorable moment of the night was] definitely the final question,” Mark Waldeck, a 7th grade science teacher and member of “Colony Collapse Disorder”, said. “We were struggling with it because Mr. Laxague, a geography teacher here at Clarke, misheard the date and was attempting to come up with a Holy Roman Emperor from 1800. At the last minute, we reminded him that the date was actually 800, and he immediately came up with the answer [of ‘Charlemagne’] before time expired.”
There were also student-only teams who participated in the bee, like “Flexington” from LHS.
“[The Trivia Bee] was quite competitive, more so than… expected. Many of the teachers know answers to the questions that are within their fields, and some return year after year with the goal of winning it all,” Nick Rommel, the leader of the “Flexington” team, said.
In addition to changes in the style of competition and scoring, this year there was a push for greater audience participation. Yellow paddle boards served as pompoms for the audience, and there were trivia questions to engage enthusiastic audience members between swarm transitions.
“[Of] the ones who got the right answers, we picked a winner [randomly] so an audience member got a prize through that,” Yang said.
Despite past years’ difficulty to recruit teams, Yang is optimistic about future events.
“This year there were some new teams that never participated before,” Yang said. “My friend told me that this year was so great that next year people will suffer fear of missing out.”
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