2020 Middle School Introductory Set

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Thaumatibis gigantea
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Location: New Jersey

2020 Middle School Introductory Set

Post by Thaumatibis gigantea »

Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence (PACE) has created a free set of questions that is appropriate for middle school or high school students who have never played before in order to introduce new people and schools to quizbowl. The first round of questions is available freely through hsquizbowl.org.

If you would like the remainder of the questions (at no charge!), please request them by emailing [email protected]. Preference will be given to people who identify themselves as a coach of a particular school. If you have any questions or other requests, we are happy to work with you.

If you find this introductory question set to be valuable, or if you would like to donate to PACE to support projects like this that promote the growth of quiz bowl, we have a donation page and welcome your donations. PACE is a 501(c)3 nonprofit.
Rebecca Rosenthal, Bergen County Academies '16, Swarthmore College '20
PACE, Director of Communications
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tiwonge
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Re: 2020 Middle School Introductory Set

Post by tiwonge »

At the suggestion of Chris Chiego and PACE VP of Outreach, David Reinstein, we've spent the last few months putting together a middle school novice set. Samir Sarma (Eden Prairie High School) and I wrote the bulk of the five-packet set, with other questions written by Benjamin McAvoy-Bickford, Dhruv Pendharkar, Zachary Knecht, and Ahilan Eraniyan.

Our philosophy in writing the set was to write questions that the typical middle school student could answer. We selected TU answerlines that we thought most students would know, and we made sure that the giveaway was enough of a giveaway. (Unfortunately, the university library closed down during the pandemic, so I couldn't access middle school textbooks like I was planning.) For bonuses, our philosophy was to err on the side of easy, so most of the bonuses have and E/E/M format. I wanted them to be easy enough that students had a good chance of getting at least 1 or 2 parts, if they had heard of the topic, and given the gaps in some knowledge bases (or students just not remembering things), I decided it was OK to give them two shots at an easier part. While our answerlines were chosen to be easy and gettable, we also used clues in the tossups and bonuses to introduce students to some of the canon. This way, the set is not only accessible, but provides a good launching point for interested students to start studying for quiz bowl. The bonuses do vary in difficulty. Some have three easier parts, and others have harder parts that will challenge students, but I think that even the hard bonus parts are fair, and are taught in middle school or are part of the general culture.

The packets are 21/21 questions with the following distribution:
Literature/Language Arts
US History
Non-US History
Biology
Physics/Chem
Math
Other Science
Music
Other Fine Arts
Religion
Myth
US Geography (x2)
Non-US Geography (x2)
Current Events/Government
Interdisciplinary/Other
Pop Music
Movies and TV
Other Pop Culture
General Knowledge

This distribution was based on the suggestion of David Reinstein. We found that the geography distribution was probably more than it should have been, so we got creative with a lot of the geography, mixing culture, science, history and literature in with the geography clues and answerlines. (I still wish I could include more literature, but that area is not standardized enough to be able to get many questions that would be widely enough known. We did include some lit clues in other questions, but there's still not a lot of literature.) We had a lot of fun getting creative with some of these answerlines, and I think the set reflects that.

We playtested these questions for real, live, actual middle school students who do not play quiz bowl. (My niece said that before she played the questions, she was worried that they'd be hard, but they were fine, which I guess means that it hit the spot.) The students were sometimes buzzing in mid-question, and sometimes buzzing in at the end of the question, but almost every tossup got answered. For the ones that didn't, we edited, or re-wrote the questions. We had a couple of elementary students play the questions, and while it's probably hard for elementary school, it might be a good challenge for gifted students in upper elementary. I think that the leadins are hard enough that the tossups scale up to novice high school, although the bonuses are probably too easy for novice high school.

This set is just five packets long, so it's not suitable for a tournament (except maybe an intramural scrimmage tournament for a club). Because it's not a tournament set, there are some answerlines that are repeated (not egregiously so, but we weren't too worried about avoiding repeats), and some areas of world history/geography got more emphasis than others. It would make a good tryout set for a middle school team, or good practice material, especially since four of the five packets aren't publicly available to students. For high school teams, it might also be a good set to give to teachers at your feeder middle schools, to show them what it might be like and get a team set up there.

I want to thank everybody who helped out on this set. Ankit, Chris and David for suggestions before we started writing; Tejas Raje, Charles Yu, and Michael Bentley looked over the set and made corrections and helpful suggestions; the children of my sisters and friends, the Indian community in Apple Valley, and the members of the Pacific Northwest Discord for helping playtest the questions; and the writers, especially Benamin and Samir who helped write and contributed suggestions and advice throughout the process. I wouldn't have been able to finish this without Samir's contributions to the questions, and his prodding me to keep working when I hit the wall about 3/4 of the way through.
Colin McNamara, Boise State University
Member, PACE
Idaho Quiz & Academic Teams
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