The End of Trivia?

By bcurran On August 29, 2012 · 6 Comments

So I’ve developed a mild to moderate obsession with a game called Quizzo. It’s a live weekly trivia game that’s played at local watering holes in the area. Some friends and I have been going fairly regularly this summer and I have to say, it’s pretty darn fun. Topics range from pop culture to sports to history to more obscure things like the one that kept us from the top of the rankings last night, cheese.

But here’s the thing with Quizzo…no cell phones allowed. The internet is strictly forbidden. All answers must come from our own mental banks of obscure information.

I’ve always loved facts and trivia. My own personal bank of useless info is fairly vast, I’m proud to say. But as an educator, I’ve been thinking. Does trivia have value? Is having a noggin crammed with tidbits and minutiae worth anything in the digital age? As educators we strive to teach students in ways that will develop thinking skills and creativity. We don’t want them Googling questions, and we try like crazy to avoid tests and assessments that have Google-able items on them. Surely some factual knowledge is still worth learning.

Obviously, books still exist (at least as of this writing they do). So I suppose students can build their own mental banks through that. That’s where I got a lot of mine from. But some of it is from school…Mrs. Grant made me learn the US Presidents in order and the states and capitals. Mr. Nuss made me learn the 27 amendments to the constitution. Thanks to Mrs. Jones I know what phylums and protists are. And so on.

Are these still things we should be teaching in school? How do you decide? Is it important to encourage kids to devour information in a way that will help them dominate trivia nights in the future? If you can look anything up on your laptop or phone in a matter of seconds, is there any point in using precious compartments of your brain to store random facts? And will trivia nights exist in a few decades? I certainly hope so, because I found out last night that the trivia league winner gets a trophy.

I know this is a lot of questions; I’m curious to know your thoughts. Be sure to leave a comment and while you’re at it, don’t forget to subscribe to our blog so you never miss another post!

photo credit: unloveablesteve via photo pin cc

Landlsstuff

We can Google anything that we want to know….as long as the power is on, the laptop has not crashed, the router is not buggered, and so on and so forth. If we were sure that would NEVER come a time that the infrastructure did not fail or was not controlled by those who would have a vested interest in keeping people “dumb” then no, we would not need to teach kids anything but how to look information up. In my opinion, that time has not come nor will it ever come. Besides, as you pointed out, trivia is fun! I also expect there might be some neuroscience to back up the benefits of training our brains to retain information…but I’m just guessing about that.
Landlsstuff

OK, should have proof-read…please focus on content and not typos. ;-D
Alex

my response here: clasgtr.wordpress.com (X world of wonders)
Ken O

The thing I like about Quizzo is that many of their questions are written in a way that takes the game a bit beyond mere trivia. There have been many occasions where I don’t know the answer, but I can deduce a reasonable (and many times correct) guess using clues in the question.

So while memorizing trivia facts may not have as much educational value as it used to, the ability to reason out a problem and arrive at a logical answer, or at least use prior knowledge and basic deduction to rule out incorrect answers, will always be useful skills.

-Ken O (member of reigning Quizzo Cup Championship team)
Quizzo’s greatest player

There is one, and only one, issue that requires any sort of dialogue when it comes to Quizzo and that is why would Quizzo schedule a playoff round at Green Lantern on a weekend when it is already one of the busiest restaurants in SE Oakland County.

The second most important question to be answered regarding Quizzo is why doesn’t the pay phone in Augies men’s room work?
Lemuel

As a fellow trivia/nerd-dom enthusiast who also went to school to be a teacher, I’m I would say it’s actually schools that are becoming obsolete at this point–not trivia night.
When you can look up anything instantly, anything you do in school just seems like busy-work. And the faster technological advances snowball onto themselves, the faster schools just become out of date and out of touch.
And I’m definitely not saying that there aren’t benefits to going to school. Going to school forces people to be exposed to ideas that they may not have stumbled upon themselves, meet (and work together with) people they otherwise wouldn’t, and power through high-pressure scenarios, and concentrate on things. But even a lot of this, events like trivia nights do, and do better. The only difference is that, in a lot of those cases, you have to be old enough to drink–and hence, out of school–making it a moot choice.