I was able to tie events of this week into last week's letter. Last week, I went over a way to improve the approach of covering current events, by incorporating the natural process of event happening to writing about it to editing to presentation in a question, and using the average time to gauge your spaced repetition for memorization. This week started one of the annual news events that must force new questions and answers into the quiz bowl canon. It's Nobel Prize Week, and it's time to learn how to treat it for your team.
I’m going to suggest a fourfold approach here. The first step is understanding the process of creating the awards. This is a small collection of information, but it sets up the context of winning the award. Second is the historical list of winners, and how winning a Nobel Prize is a signifier of a person being worth knowing as an answer. Third is acquiring the knowledge of this year’s winners, and why they are significant. Fourth is applying what was learned in answering the first three points to other annual awards in other fields. At each step I’ve given my opinion of what form the study material should resemble.
1. What the Nobel Prizes are. (Single page study guide)
These exist, and give the essential information you need to cover about them.
What are the categories?
Why were the Nobel Prizes created?
Who awards them?
Why was Economics added later?
This you can find in many infographics, and contain enough information to teach in practice.
2. Who has won previous Nobel Prizes? (A very long set of lists and really a criterion for dividing answers)
For quiz bowl, the Nobel Prizes are a sort of clue that inexperienced writers think should drop to the end of the question. This is usually fraught because the clue implies memorization of the list by year, and that's neither productive nor focused on the achievements of the recipient. It assumes dry memorization of the table of winners.
There are some small lists worth memorization (those who won twice, notable literature winners who are the only winner from their nation.) but generally the whole list by year isn't worth committing to memory because it won't be brought up in a year context. You’re much better off learning the context of the winner’s citation. (Except for Literature, which by design all sound similar to each other, and rarely reference uniquely identifying material like works.)
There are also a small number of people who were notable because of the circumstance of them not winning the Nobel Prize, or their refusal of the prize. These are things that you learn not from the list of winners, but from the anecdotes around the list of winners.
The winners are also a noisy lot of disordered information. Some winners may be worth knowing in their field, but not for a quiz bowl purpose, or they may be less famous than the discovery for which they won the award.
3. How are this year's winners going to be added to the canon? (Analysis from reading the news and citation)
With three of them in at time of writing I can safely predict these will be the "AI" Nobels, as the Physics and Chemistry awards tie into the creation or use of AI models. That's going to be problematic in writing questions about the subject, since you have the subtle distinctions between artificial intelligence and machine learning making either ambiguous as an answer. I actually think there's a better chance of the other announced award becoming a clue, and that is because microRNA can tie to RNA, a well established answer, and also to C. elegans, the model organism, where it was found.
This is somewhat disingenuous of me, I know that these are already appearing in questions at college level events, and even in some high level high school matches, but winning the Nobel permits the difficulty to be bent down a little.
Where I'd actually go with this year’s winners is approach the model organism fact, and build a study guide listing model organisms and the notable breakthroughs achieved in their study. I suggested this earlier this week as a YGK, but I'm leaving it to a more capable biology writer than myself to tackle.
4. Are there other annual awards which might benefit from this approach? (Possibly a multipage study guide or a YGK of your own design.)
Last year I did do a study guide for the Seton team, covering the Nobels and other annual awards that become notable in quiz bowl. But it never was brought up in practice, because it was the end of the year, and that week's practice got cancelled by a water main leak. In revisiting it today, I found it needs a couple of adjustments. I wrote it too highbrow, covering things like the Fields Medal, the Akutagawa Prize, and the Pritzker Prize, which while they are considered the Nobel’s of their particular categories, are not often referenced outside of quiz bowl. Those examples also show you a particular problem with the list, if you’re going that deep, your list is too long. The list is currently two full pages and 13 entries which is a bit longer than a You Gotta Know, which was what I was emulating in writing this. In creating the list of awards I also missed putting the four best known awards to the public, the EGOT components.
Over the next week or so, I’ll put all of these in the team’s google drive, making it something they can learn from on their own time. As a coach, you can see this as a way to teach annual events which come up in questions.
It’s been two weeks since I picked up a new copy of the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and I have to note that it makes it very easy to create a specific kind of question for television competitions. I had occasion to write some practice rounds of the television competition, and to imitate the categories given it matches they may play, I started writing category rounds like Starts with B, or the like. This is one of the most common patterns for categories, and it’s something that has been true for decades about televised competition. Having a physical dictionary like the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy turbocharges the process of creating those questions in a way that websites can’t really do.
Allow me to explain the layout of the book, and how it helps us in this situation. The book is broken into about fifteen sections, each a category of knowledge, with cultural references in those sections listed alphabetically. So if we wanted to create a category round with a subject like M in History, or F in Science, it’s trivially easy to select the right section, move through the alphabet until you find the right letter that has enough entries, and just go to town. Alternatively if I wanted to create matching categories for multiple teams for a single episode, I could mark the sections I wanted to hit, and pick three letters, and fill one entry from each letter and each section into the corresponding round.
There are elements of this that have to be considered: you need to balance the difficulty as you’re constructing questions and rounds, you can’t use this too often as your method becomes obvious, and the pattern is rather obvious when you see all the matches. But given the speed this allows one to create a particular type of question, it’s one of the few ways to accelerate production. Any writer with a deadline might consider the approach.