On Saturday, Jan 25, students gathered around the commons areas of Thatcher Hall to watch and play Trivia. The first portion takes place with no audience upstairs, while the second portion takes places downstairs, with all houses present. Teams consist of six house members plus one faculty member. Those teams are given a piece of paper with three questions pertaining to a theme or topic, like science or music, and have to answer all three questions within the time limit. The houses are scored on a combination of their upstairs and downstairs scores.
The official standings had Moser in last, then Summerbell, then Regester, Thornwood, Neville, and first place went to Cooper.
The rules of downstairs trivia changed from last year to this year, to eliminate chance. Instead of a traditional “Jeoapardy” setup, with the board looking the same way, and a “Final Jeopardy”, the board was a traditional trivia setup, with three questions per topic. Trivia teams were then tasked with answering the questions and then at the end, one team member partook in a “Lightning Round”, which consisted of a two minute timer where the contestant had to answer as many possible questions.
Cooper’s “secret weapon” was math teacher, Aaron McCollum, who got every single math based question correct on the upstairs trivia portion, leading their upstairs score to be miles ahead of the other houses. Two more key players were seniors Mily James and Linda Pan.
“We divided into two groups, one math and one English, and we divided all the papers and the questions up between the groups. We finished with like 17 minutes on the clock and the math group finished with 15 minutes,” James said. “We had a lot of time to check our work. Watching the downstairs portion was probably my favorite part though.”
Cooper house had a final composite score of 541, while Neville in second place had a score of only 497, meaning they beat Neville by a margin of 44 points. The houses from second place to last all had scores closer to one another.
The big six point win for Cooper helped them solidify their first place spot in the final Rumpus standings. This also came along with the first place win in Gauntlet, a four time first place finish, and a second place finish in Lip Sync.