IAGB Jeopardy Competition

Creating quizzes has been an activity of interest to me for many years now. The first time I hosted a quiz competition was when I was in high school. The idea of quizzing to me is not just teasing the brain but making the experience fun and entertaining. I always hated the types ‘the tallest…’, the longest…’, ‘the oldest…’. It is obvious that not everyone knows everything and hence that goal always has been to frame questions in such a manner that participants can arrive at the correct answer by some intelligent guessing.

Since Jeopardy flips the trivia onto its head – writing up the answers and hoping the participants knew enough to be able to guess the question, was lot of fun. My co-host Nipun Goel was the perfect partner I could have asked for. Between us we came up with categories and built up our answer bank. As for the participants – we had requested for two – member teams and the hope was that a ‘parent-child’ combination, would participate as a team (we did advertise as such but did not make it mandatory). The response was great and feedback even better. 

Our first-place winners were: Sushil and Anika Bhartan. Anika is a Junior in high school and an avid reader, which certainly reflected in the ‘Books’ category that she completely dominated. Our second-place winners were Hemant and Sid Chinni. Sid is in 4th grade and a prodigy. While we could only choose two teams, all participants were extremely good, and all were within shot of each other as far as the scores concerned. Finally, it was most satisfying to us as hosts of the fact that, of the total 126 clues between the two preliminary rounds and the final round – only 3 clues stumped our participants and went ‘unquestioned’. We hope we made the great Alex Trebek smile.

 

–Sanjay Kudrimoti