How to Distribute Academic Subjects for Knowledge Bowl

Distributing Strategically

Once you’ve picked your team for Knowledge Bowl, it’s important not only to make sure that you have good chemistry and work well together in general, but also that you distribute topics and regions of academia across your group. Knowledge Bowl questions span every subject and any topic could be asked about, so it’s crucial you’ll be able to know as soon as you buzz in whose specialty it is to answer. You also wouldn’t want to have all math people on your team, or all literature, because although you would probably nail the math/literature problems, you would have nothing once a geography question came. Balance in teams could arguably even be more important than chemistry, because if the knowledge just isn’t there, it isn’t possible to get it during the heat of the moment, no matter how well everybody works together.

Shared Knowledge VS Specialization

Of course, there are alternative routes, like having every player on the team build up general knowledge, but the downside of this is that there is much more discussion and debate as many people’s knowledge overlap. There may not be a clear answer most of the time when most players have a good idea of the question. In order to be specific and strategic, I have created a distribution of (nearly) all Knowledge Bowl topics that could be seen in an average tossup, ranging from rare questions to practically every other question:

• Literature
• Space
• Technology
• Religion
• Philosophy
• Grammar and usage
• Geography
• Geology
• Wars and conflicts
• Political and social movements
• Binary
• Animal world
• Government and politics
• The arts (painting, sculpture, etc.)
• Landforms
• Native American culture
• Health and Medicine
• The Human Body
• Economics
• Business
• Eras and their highlights
• Law
• Math, Numbers, Conversions, and Measurements
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Climate and Weather

Of course, each team will distribute and order this list differently, and not every item on the list needs to be covered in every successful team, but it’s important to understand the scope of each question.

Written Round Strategy

In the written round especially, this tactic of dividing up topics can come in handy. If there are five players on a team (in some states, there are six; in others four; but this still applies) and there are nearly thirty topics, this allows for about six topics per player. Once you have distributed topics according to previous knowledge and who is inclined to learn what, it becomes much easier to tackle the written round than before. Rather than simply passing around the sheets and hoping somebody will have the right answer, it becomes easy to assign certain questions to certain team members and everything can in general go faster.