Knowledge Bowl is the name for several interdisciplinary academic quiz bowl-like competitions across the United States and the world. The questions for many Knowledge Bowl competitions are supplied by the Academic Hallmarks company of Durango, Colorado.
While Knowledge Bowl meet formats are mostly similar across the United States, there are a few regional differences. Knowledge Bowl usually involves teams of four to six students trying to answer questions in a written round and several oral rounds. No team is eliminated in this event, and every team participates in every round. Knowledge Bowl is usually a power competition in which team groupings are rearranged after each round on the basis of their total points accumulated. The written round is a multiple-choice exam taken by each team as a whole. Results of this round are used for seeding teams in the oral rounds. Oral rounds involves three teams per room and uses an electronic lock-out device system. A reader presents the questions, and a team member may buzz in as soon as he or she chooses. If they miss a question, nothing is deducted, but the other teams then may try to answer the question based on who buzzed in first. The winner is the team with the greatest number of points at the end of the meet.
Knowledge Bowl in Colorado
History
Knowledge Bowl originated in 1976 as a project within the San Juan Board of Cooperative Services in Durango, Colorado. It began in response to a group of area student body leaders who asked if the organization would develop and host some kind of competitive academic activity involving excellent students. The first meet held in Pagosa Springs involved just three high schools. Within two years, it evolved to include scores of invitational meets in addition to regional competitions and a Colorado state championship that has been held annually ever since.
The first statewide Colorado State Knowledge Bowl was held in 1978 at Fort Lewis College in Durango. Most of the competing teams that year came from schools in mountain districts. One of the few Front Range schools in the competition that year, Green Mountain High School in Jefferson County, won the first statewide championship. Green Mountain would go on to triumph in three of the first four years of the competition, taking first place in 1980 and 1981 as well. The event soon attracted educators from Minnesota, Washington, and South Dakota who initiated Knowledge Bowl programs in their home states.
From 1983 to 2012, Colorado teams also participated in a Colorado-specific Knowledge Master Open (KMO) online competition. Teams answered the entire set of 200 questions together, earning a score from 0 to 2000. Each school sent in their scores and in a few weeks received a summary of how the school fared against other Colorado schools. Colorado KMO, along with the KMO program as a whole, was discontinued after the 2012-2013 academic year.
Meet Format
In Colorado, the meets start off with the written round. This round comprises 40 or 60 multiple choice questions that the team attempts to answer correctly. The team can discuss the question only during the written round. Depending on the school, the team may have between three and eight people, however only four will compete in the written round. The scores from the written round determines which teams will compete against each other in the first oral round.
Following the written round teams compete in four oral rounds of forty or fifty questions each during which three teams compete against each other in a single room. Similarly to the written round, only four members of a team may take part in these rounds, but player substitutions may occur in after the first half of the questions. The subject line is read before the question. Teams can buzz at any time, even before the reader has finished reading the question. The team may not talk about the answer to the question, but they may talk about who will answer the question (In the Colorado Springs area meets, no talking period is allowed. However, teammates may use hand signals to determine who will answer). A sheet of paper is allowed for computations and for keeping score. If the first team to buzz in fails to answer the question in 15 seconds or answers incorrectly and no other team has buzzed in either of the other two teams may ask the reader to finish the question and/or repeat the question only once. After each round the scores are totaled and the teams reorganized and assigned to rooms according to their scores. After the final round, the team with the highest score wins the meet.