Senate hosts its school-wide Brain Game competition every year during the spring semester where each SSRT at this school has the opportunity to put together a team of students to compete against one another in a “Jeopardy”-style tournament. 

With this year’s competition season finishing with a final match on Mar. 14, during SSRT, Luke Boyce, Brain Game chair and junior, said the trivia questions asked during Brain Game consist of a multitude of different categories such as geography, entertainment, history, art, literature, science, math, sports, leisure, current events and miscellaneous.

Joshua Yi, former finalist in Brain Game and senior, said participating in the competition was an enjoyable and unique experience. 

Yi is among many students who take part in the annual tradition. According to Senate sponsor Michelle Foutz, running the Brain Game competition is a long-run tradition at this school that had been going on for multiple decades, with a considerable portion of the school’s SSRT classes choosing to partake in the event.

Furthermore, Grayson Miller, Brain Game participant and junior, said engaging in the competition improved his teamwork skills significantly.

He said on occasion you get asked questions that you aren’t entirely confident about while one of your teammates is definitely more experienced in that area. So, he said, you might have to delegate that because they have a better chance of answering correctly. 

“With Brain Game, you can’t talk to your teammates. It’s all about nonverbal communication as well as really putting trust in your teammates,” he said. 

Boyce expressed a similar view and said, “Students learn a lot about teamwork from Brain Game because they have to have trust in their other teammates and trust that everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Someone might know a lot more about sports and someone else might know a lot more about history, but you’re kind of trusting each other.”

According to The Journal Of Educational Psychology, team-based trivia games can enhance social interactions and communication. Engaging in such activities encourages teamwork, problem-solving, and shared cognitive challenges, which contribute to both individual and group learning.

Additionally, Yi said being in Brain Game provided him with the chance to participate in a team event, where he could have fun with friends and engage in a friendly competition.

“It was a fun experience that allowed me to participate on a team and mess around with my friends,” Yi said. “It was kind of like many of the other things I like to do with them, like playing sports.”

Boyce said Senate’s motivation to host Brain Game is to host a variety of different events that cater to different parts of the student body throughout the year. Brain Game really caters more academically-inclined students.

 He said, “As student government leaders, we try to put together activities that would generate interest in different groups throughout the school. Some groups are very passionate about Brain Game and they have individual SSRT competitions to decide who their representatives are. And so it’s fun for us to be able to provide an activity that is really exciting to a certain demographic in our school.”

Yi also said he saw Brain Game as an opportunity to compete, brandish his intelligence and enjoy the moment with his peers.

“The game is fast-paced and switches between a bunch of topics quickly, something which isn’t that common in school. The most important skill I learned from Brain Game was thinking on the fly,” he said. 

Boyce said Brain Game is a really good way for students in their SSRT to make connections with each other and make new friends that they may not have had as teachers make teams of students from their classes. 

“Brain Game wasn’t something that made me more eager to learn,” Yi said. “But it was fun in that it let me show off whatever ‘trivia’ knowledge I had picked up, which I thought would be useless otherwise.”

This year’s Brain Game finalists:

Allison Hargrove’s SSRT: Seniors Anna Liao, Anthony Pho, Brian Pho, Aayush Singh

Allyson Cooksey’s SSRT: Juniors Grayson Miller, Elliott Sell, Ryan Sharp, Keefe Yang