The National History Bee and Bowl’s Guide to Quiz Bowl Resources
By David Madden, NHBB Executive Director, Summer 2011 (Updated Summer 2012)
Websites
The You Gotta Know pages, are one of the best online resources for getting the most relevant information on scores of topics that come up again and again. Organized by subject headings (e.g. deserts, New York Yankees, Civil War Battles, etc.), the YGK pages are not all-encompassing, but provide a great starting point. NAQT has recently begun to update YGK again after a hiatus. NAQT’s website also has information on NAQT tournaments, including HSNCT, the High School National Championship Tournament, which had 240 teams this year.
ACE Quiz Bowl Camps are a great way for students to improve their games over the summer, to meet other quiz bowlers from around the country, and have a great time. In the summer of 2012, ACE held camps in Oklahoma, Tennessee, Ohio, and Illinois, and in 2013, it is possible that they will be expanding their camps in the Northeast & Midwest. Meanwhile, on their website, similar to YGK, the ACE study guides are another great set of resources. Certain guides have highlighted information, which helps students prioritize the information presented.
This is the most comprehensive site for old quiz bowl packets, an invaluable study resource. Of course, packets vary considerably in terms of difficulty and quality(anything advertising itself as having been written by one of the top teams in the country is usually on the hard side; look for “novice” or “freshman-sophomore” tournaments for easier questions.) Older packets may not be consistent with recent trends in question writing, both in terms of distribution and question structure.
HSAPQ (High School Academic Pyramid Questions) maintains an extensive packet archive on their site, including questions from last year’s National History Bowl Regionals and National Championships and NASAT (the year-end state all star tournament). Over 20 sets are available. Generally these questions are very well-written, and slightly longer than NAQT questions.
A great resource developed by former members of the Torrey Pines team in California, it allows you to search by category and difficulty to find the sort of tossups you need most to improve your game. Best of all, the site features two “play-along” functions, one of which hides the answers to tossups until you click on them, the other of which actually reveals words in the tossups one at a time so you can buzz in on your computer, give your answer, and see how you stack up against the competition. Log in with Facebook to track your scores!
The quiz bowl forums at hsquizbowl.org are the premier resource for now for finding out about upcoming tournaments and discussing all things quiz bowl. Discussions, known as ‘threads,’ discuss tournament formats, question formats, tournament logistics, quality of teams, tournament results, etc.Please be familiar with forum rules before posting to avoid any problems. Under High School Tournament Announcements, you can also find the latest on the free Online Skype Practice League that the National History Bee and Bowl sponsors. Two of your school’s players can play in any one round (rounds last 3 weeks). There will be four rounds over the course of the year for both novices and experts, followed by a Champions’ League.
and (Note new high school Bee website for 2012-13!)
The homepages of the National History Bee and Bowl, these sites have the most updated and comprehensive information on the fastest growing academic competitions in the USA, with 80-90 tournaments projected for 2011-2012 in the USA and beyond. The sites also feature information on NHBB Nationals which will be in Washington, DC on April 26-28, 2013 and will have information on logistical preparations, competition sites (including historic mansions, the Smithsonian, embassies, etc.), and registered teams beginning in fall 2012.
The former website of the High School National History Bee has now been transferred to the Elementary & Middle School History Bee. This competition is open to all students in 8th grade and younger, and is a great way for the younger students in your school district to get involved in a tournament prior to reaching high school. Middle schools are also welcome to send JV History Bowl teams to the regional tournaments, and then attend a separate National Championships in May 2013. NAQT also offers middle school tournaments, as well as the Middle School National Championship Tournament.
This site maintains a full database of tens of thousands of past Jeopardy! questions organized chronologically. There’s no function to sort by category, and keep in mind of course that Jeopardy! and quiz bowl are two completely different sorts of competitions. However, this can be a helpful and fun resource when used with that caveat in mind. Plus, you can see who answered the questions correctly, and who did not.
A great service to the quizbowl community, Matt’s Buzzers provides grants of $200 towards the purchase of a buzzer system for teams that win an annual draw. Matt’s Buzzers was founded in memory of Matt Cvijanovich, a former quizbowl star who passed away in 2005. Make sure your school enters the draw if you need a new buzzer system! Check out their Facebook page, linked from their website, to see which schools have applied.
Created by a player from Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, NJ, this group is one of the fastest growing social media groups in the game. With close to 700 members as of August 1, this group is a great place to go to meet fellow players, arrange informal practices on Skype or Tinychat and participate in discussion outside of the regular scope of the forums.
Speaking of Tinychat, this site is accessible via mobile phone as it is currently supported for iPhone and Android phones. You can add variety to your practice by sharing YouTube videos of quizbowl TV shows, SoundCloud tracks of your favorite reader reading questions, or write out math calculation tossups and bonuses on the FlockDraw whiteboard. It also allows video chatting with those in the room.
The most comprehensive results database of past quizbowl tournaments – including OSPL –was incorporated as part of the hsquizbowl.org site last season. You can also find information on upcoming tournaments here. Each listing of an upcoming tournament includes a link to a related post in the forum section, and each previous tournament has stats links, when available. The information is easily searchable, too. Use this after practicing on a specific set to find how others did playing it in actual tournaments.
With a larger question database than Quizbowl DB, this website promises to be a great resource once it is fully developed. Keep checking back to see if the site is up and running again.
This is a multiplayer quizbowl reader that allows you to create games of any length using questions supplied by Quizbowl DB. You can password protect your games, too. You’ll have to use the latest version of your browser of choice to access this, as it uses some of the latest technology such as HTML5 to operate. This was created by a current player at Raleigh Charter HS in North Carolina.
Books
An Incomplete Education By Judy Jones and William Wilson
AIE was my quiz bowl bible while in high school. I literally won entire tournaments for my team based on the studying I did from it. Granted, much of the information contained within this cultural literacy tome is beyond the scope of quiz bowl (e.g. basically the entire chapter on vocabulary), but much of it is outstanding; i.e. pithy Shakespearean plot summaries, good descriptions of major religions, a strong American Literature section, etc. The tone is very tongue-in-cheek, but I found it a pleasure to read. Again and again and again.
Prisoner of Trebekistan By Bob Harris (see:
Not a study guide, per se, but rather the account of how one guy used the experience of studying for Jeopardy! to transform his outlook on life. Basically, Bob taught himself loads of information to succeed on Jeopardy! (which he did; he’s one of the show’s most successful contestants ever), and then went back and read the books whose titles and authors he had memorized, went and visited the countries whose capitals and currencies he had learned, joined all the religions he had learned about (well, okay, not that, but you get the point). Bob is a stand-up comedian, so the book teems with humor. A must read for everyone in the quiz bowl universe.
The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge
Fills in many of the gaps where An Incomplete Education doesn’t cover things. Not nearly as entertaining to read, but a great resource to look up various subjects quickly.
The Teaching Company / Recorded Books
These are CD courses of college lectures. They also come with outlines that are very handy. Next time you’ve got a long car ride ahead of you, get these! I particularly recommend anything by Timothy B. Shutt of Kenyon College (Recorded Books) or Daniel Robinson of Georgetown University and Robert Bucholz of Loyola University of Chicago (Teaching Company).
For more book ideas, check out NAQT’s list of reading material at .
Studying Techniques: “Divide and Conquer!” and “Climb the Pyramid!”
Many quizbowlers practice with their teams, read questions on their own, and obviously compete at tournaments. However, what really separates the great teams from everyone else, is a systematic approach to preparation. Practicing with teammates and reading through questions is helpful, but the level of competition gets better each year, and everyone’s time is limited. So where can you get an edge?
Start by having your team divide up responsibility for different subjects among different players. Don’t limit this to the “A-team” – B team and C team members (and if you really want to go all out, middle schoolers with talent who will feed into your school) should be assigned subjects to focus on too. It makes no sense to have everyone on the team studying all the same information if you play together on a routine basis. Note that there’s no need to simply divide up subjects like “Math and Science” “Social Studies” “Literature” and “Fine Arts.” Take into account what subjects people are studying in school, have studied in the past, and where team members’ interests lie. It’s okay if one team member takes European History and Chemistry while someone else takes American History and Physics. Moreover, a little overlap is okay and inevitable, and can even be a good thing in moderation if a particular player on your team can’t make a tournament. Also, if you’re the captain of your team (or think you might be in a year or two), consider taking on a greater share of subjects than other members on your team. This might not be “fair,” but the reality is that your talent might be greater than some other students on your team. If this is the case, then maybe you could step in and take over “non-Greek mythology,” for example, while still leaving Greek mythology nominally in the hands of a different player.
Finally, don’t overlook subjects like mythology, sports and entertainment (e.g. “trash”), philosophy, religion, economics, sociology, anthropology, film, geography, and current events. Some tournaments focus more on these than others, and these subjects might not fall under one of the classic headings, but someone on your team should have responsibility for them.
Then, once you know what your area of expertise is, then it’s time to start going about your studying systematically. The best time to do this is NOT during team practice, and definitely not at tournaments. Yes, you will pick up things there, but if you want to raise your game and your team to the next level, you need to commit to a certain level of preparation on your own. How much time does this require? That’s up to you, but the top players in the country routinely practice 10+ hours a week. If your goal, however, is first to make your school’s A-team, or win a regional invitational tournament, then perhaps 3-6 hours is a good amount to start off with.
In order to study systematically, you will probably want to make notes in a study binder. Organize your binders by subject, and then divide your binders into more specific headings. For history, you could have a history binder, and then sections divided into Ancient History, US History, European History, Asian History, etc. If you’re responsible for European History on your team, then maybe organize your notes by centuries or country.
But what should go in your notes? First thing to make clear: NOT every last bit of information in every tossup question or page in a cultural literacy book that you use to study. While memorizing information contained at the start of a tossup might help you answer a particular question on that subject very quickly, information at the beginning of a tossup is by definition less-widely known. Similarly, all sorts of facts could be used to open a tossup, memorizing any one particular fact at the start of a tossup is a low-percentage strategy in most cases.
A better way to go about things is to “climb the pyramid.” Most quality tossups these days are “pyramidal” in nature, meaning that they begin with the more obscure information and move to the more familiar. When reading tossups on your own, what you should do is figure out where you would buzz if you heard the question in competition. Then, go back to the 1-2 facts that immediately precede what clue you used to buzz in. Find those 1-2 facts. WRITE THEM DOWN IN YOUR STUDY BINDER!!! Then repeat the process with as many good tossups as you can get your hands on. Bear in mind that you should pay particular attention to tossups where you’re buzzing in late. While this may be due primarily to a difficult tossup, it may also be indicative that your knowledge base on this particular topic needs to deepen. Finally, if possible, see if you can compare different tossups with the same answer lines. If certain information is contained in multiple questions on the same subject, then that information might be especially worth knowing.
The simple act of writing things down will help tremendously in your studying. But then you need to review it. And review it. Don’t have access to your notes? Run through them in your head. The major difference between studying for a course in school and studying for quizbowl is that in quizbowl, the information needs to get into your long-term memory. In order for this to happen, you need to review most facts repeatedly, and then go back and read through it once a month or so to make sure you don’t “lose” that bit of information.
This method of preparation is by no means the only way to succeed in quiz bowl. However, you’re a teenager, which means your life is busy. If you want to maximize your efficiency (and you should), climb the pyramid by using the method described here! And don’t forget to bring your study binder to practice and tournaments, so you can add to it as needed as well. As you improve, you’ll realize that you’ll be writing down more information towards the start of tossups. And you’ll rack up more wins in competition to show for it as well. Winning and getting smarter. Not a bad combination! Good luck in all your quiz bowl endeavors this year (and hope to see you at a National History Bee and Bowl tournament near you!)