National Middle School History Bee Airing on History on 6/1

[Standard-winged Nightjar]

http://www.history.com/shows/history-bee/articles/about-the-history-bee

Tune in to the History Channel at Edit 5/18: 8pm Eastern, 7pm Central to see how it all goes down! We taped this last Saturday in DC - everything went great, and this will hopefully lay a great foundation for years to come for the History Bee, and eventually, quizbowl in general. The first few rounds are Jeopardy style in that the students have to wait until the end of the question before buzzing, but the final head to head round features students ringing in as soon as they could. Hopefully, this will trickle down to the earlier rounds in subsequent years - we'll see. In any case, History has been an amazing supporter of this competition throughout the past year.

[Mr. Joyboy]

In Brian Unger's bio they don't mention that he holds the merchandising rights to the original kitten mittens

[Standard-winged Nightjar]

I have just been told this has now been pushed up to 8 Eastern / 7 Central on 6/1. Check local listings for exact air times, especially in Mountain and Pacific time zones.

[Bartleby]

In Brian Unger's bio they don't mention that he holds the merchandising rights to the original kitten mittens

Well, I appreciated this joke!

[Standard-winged Nightjar]

Congratulations to Tajin Rogers of Longfellow for winning our Middle School History Bee! Registration is already open for next year at historybee.com (this domain will now solely be for our Junior Competition). Also, this will be open to elementary schools next year - details forthcoming. I've been trying for 3 days to contact our webmaster about getting the high school bee site back up - when it is, it will be at www.hs.historybee.com

[List of Fighting Spirit characters]

Buzzer-based competition is always disastrous when you can only buzz in following the conclusion of the question and you have 8 different kids who all know the answer, thus making the competition a test of reflexes rather than actual knowledge. You might as well model this on the National Geographic Bee, which is by no means perfect but does a decent job differentiating among the top students (even with the inherent unfairness of giving different questions to different people) with challenging questions that only students of a certain geographic proficiency can answer. Also, the questions need to be made harder (or else become pyramidal) and the trash needs to be drastically scaled back from its current 20% frequency and Al Roker needs to be slapped after making insipid barbs about students not knowing his favorite brand of 80's TV show or whatever.

I know the History Channel had a major hand in devising the format, but try to steer them towards HSAPQ and show the demonstrable benefits of that other format.
And yes, that whole thing about being able to sell it on TV. You don't have to have the moderator read at a lightning speed like in actual quiz bowl rounds. I would actually recommend you play up the "wow" factor to attract viewers, as in the Spelling Bee or the Geography Bee, where only a tiny minority of those watching can even begin to answer what is presented. Pyramidality could do the job that absurd difficulty would in those other formats. You can have students take the audience's breath away with a first line buzz on, say, the Transcontinental Railroad, rather than have a format where many viewers will remember from high school classes that McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and thus not be suitably impressed with a bunch of students buzzer racing on that.

[Standard-winged Nightjar]

Ankit - we know, and we'll be doing what we can to make it closer to standard quiz bowl, but as you mention, we're up against some very concrete limits, at least for now. That said, we'll be reevaluating all aspects of our Middle School Bee over the summer, and the points you made will all be subject for discussion between us, History, their lawyers, the compliance company, and the production company. This requires balancing many competing opinions and prerogatives, but in principle, I agree with everything you said, minus the violence at Al, whom I think did a great job.