Hope gets its geek on at Trivia Night

About 20 teams of eight gathered in the BSC last Friday night for a battle of wits, furiously writing answers and working hard to maintain hushed voices during collaboration. “Nerdology,” hosted by Kevin Branick and Sherman Edwards, put pop culture knowledge to the test as teams competed for Hope gear, gift card prizes and intellectual dominance. The event spanned two hours with interspersed minigames, referred to as Nerd Alerts. The buy-in was $25 a group, spread between up to ten members per group. The proceeds went to Dance Marathon. The flow of the event, which was hosted by SAC, was as follows: After students gathered into teams, came up with a teamname and were asked to follow Nerdology on Twitter, the rules were delivered.

Each of the five rounds, ten questions each, would be slightly different from each other in format. One point would be given for every correct answer, which was recorded on lined sheets given to the team captain of each group. However, groups could choose to go “all-in” each round. This meant that if all ten questions were correct, the points doubled for a total of 20 points for that round. However, if even one answer was incorrect, they would accrue no points at all. The first challenge was general knowledge, in which ten questions of all sorts were asked. These varied from “What English criminal famously stole from the rich and gave to the poor?” to “What famous children’s toy has replaceable body parts and a large head?” The common theme between the answers, which was the answer to the very last question, was that they were names of famous Disney characters or movies.

After came a Nerd Alert, where three groups of two partners competed to craft the best answer to the audience questions, one word at a time. The second category was “Where there’s a Will, there’s a way.” This was a series of very short snippets from Will Ferrell movies, where audience members were tasked with naming the respective titles from the snippets. These ranged from staples such as “Elf” to titles such as “Stranger than Fiction.” After this came “Meme what you say” where a picture of a Disc Jockey cat was to be memeified by the audience via Twitter. The night continued for three additional rounds, consisting of matching shows to their fictional settings, naming the famous pop-culture captains displayed on the screen and recognizing 8-bit covers of famous songs. The group that would eventually take home the giftcard prizes was “Flat Earth,” one of the creative names.

Speaking briefly with host Kevin Branick, he commented that in the two and a half years of running the program, this night was perhaps the largest group he had performed in front of. This is why, as noted by some of the audience members, tallying the points took so long. He also expressed gratitude for the performance area: “I really love your space and school, and all of the funny answers you guys guessed!” Another great event held by SAC encouraged students to work together and put their brains to the test. SAC will continue to plan more events in the future.