Wednesday 31 January 2018

Canada questions from 2017 and before

This post is copied from our new site, which we update more reliably now. We recommend you go there instead of here.

For most high-school tournaments in Canada, ONQBA edits the question set to add in questions about Canada.

For Toronto Novice and Carleton Supermoon in December 2017, we wrote and added these questions to the set -- 18 tossups and 7 bonuses. The writers were Peter Cordeiro and me.

I removed around 75 questions from the set, many more than we added in. A few of those were math computation questions*. The rest were about American history, geography, literature, and art. The ones that weren't replaced with Canada questions were just replaced with "extra" questions from the original set. There were also a few questions about Canada or hockey in the original set, and I modified those a bit to make them harder.

I think these Canada questions were a little harder than they should have been -- they might have been more appropriate for Provincials than for a regular-season set. However, because many questions on (obscure) American topics were removed, I think the set as a whole was made easier by our edits.

I was proud of the tossup I wrote involving the French language, but the feedback I got on it was not positive, so maybe I should have found another way to write it. I think knowing French (and knowing about Quebec) is meaningful and important and is a huge part of education in Canada. I will keep trying to find ways to shoehorn a French lesson into every quizbowl tournament.

Here's a quick archive of questions we've used for Canadian editions of past tournaments:

*It's standard for quizbowl hosts to remove "math comp" questions or to instruct the moderators to skip over them. Many question providers simply don't use them in the first place. It sounds lame to be missing out on math questions, but if you heard these math questions, you'd want to skip them too.

Thursday 4 January 2018

Announced: Ontario Provincials -- March 24 at uToronto

This post is copied from our new site, which we update more reliably now. We recommend you go there instead of here.

There will be an Ontario Provincial Quizbowl Championship on Saturday, March 24, 2018, at the University of Toronto. Meghan Torchia will direct the tournament. Whoever wins will be the high-school champions of Ontario, and by default, of Canada.

Details are in my post here. It should be at least 10 rounds, on slightly tougher questions than our regular-season tournaments. The cost is between $40 and $80 for a team.

We'll be retrieving our championship plaque from Lisgar Collegiate this winter, to award again to new champions. According to known records, there have been 7 provincial quizbowl championships, and teams from Ottawa have won all of them. Many teams are strong this year, and some might be strong enough to defeat Lisgar and get the plaque out of Ottawa.

Lisgar Plaque 2016
2016 champions pose with plaque, bunny, and active high-school player.