Ithaca High School Brain Team Prepares for National Championship
ITHACA – The Ithaca High School Brain Team will be heading to three national quiz bowl championships in the coming months. This year’s team is currently number two in the state and ranked 51st in the nation.
In April, the team will be going to the National History Bee and Bowl in Washington
DC, then the High School National Championship Tournament in May, followed by
the National Scholastic Championship in June.
Benjamin Kirk, a math teacher at Ithaca High School, has been advising the team for
the past six years. The team is made up of roughly 12-15 members, and they have
been to nine competitions this year. He said that this year’s team owes their
success to members that take the initiative to study materials outside of their team
practice sessions.
“The team is now a group of sophomores who have shown a real drive to practice outside of our regular weekly sessions, to spend their spare time studying and reading question sets to learn stock clues,” Kirk said. “We have also been making a concerted effort to travel to competitions downstate and out of state, playing against some much tougher teams who have made our team stronger as a result.”
The team meets altogether on Mondays after school, and Kirk will set up a buzzer system and read questions from an online archive of quiz bowl questions. They use these practice sessions as mock quiz bowls, and Kirk keeps track of the team’s score.
Most of the team will also get together informally on Wednesdays and do more mock sessions. There are interactive online practice sessions that some members participate in, and some go as far as to study questions and materials together at home.
Kirk said the national quiz bowls are definitely something the team can study for. He said that there are certain clues that are always used in reference to particular answers, and much of practicing is familiarizing yourself with those clues.
One of the competitions the team will be attending is the National Scholastic Competition, held by the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence (PACE). Ryan Rosenberg, the Director of Communications at PACE said that the organization aims to promote healthy academic competition throughout the country.
“Our goal objective of quiz bowl as an activity is to promote learning and academic inquiry,” Rosenberg said. “The questions at NSC draw on all aspects of academic study, and successful players will be ones who are intellectually curious and have put the time in to learn about their areas of interest.”
The Brain Team will be holding a trivia night fundraiser in April to help defray the cost of the national competitions. Kirk also said that in the future, the team is hoping to start a middle school team at one of the two middle schools in the district.
The team is one of the many STEM clubs that Ithaca High School offers. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. U.S. News and World Report have rated the school the 37th best STEM high school in the country.
According to Taylor Luczak of the STEM Education Coalition, quiz bowls and other informal education programs have a very positive impact on students. He said that the coalition have been looking at all the different extracurricular activities that have a positive impact on STEM education. Though the coalition advocates for national policy for STEM, Luczak said that it is really a local level issue.
“We believe that education is a very local activity and communities must define what STEM means for them,” Luczak said. “Our Coalition has more than 600 affiliate members worldwide, including Ithaca College who is on our Leadership Council. Many local organizations are seeking to improve STEM education in their own communities.”