FAYETTEVILLE -- Quiz bowl is a competition where brainy students brawl in an educational sense, and a new startup company in Fayetteville wants to help them hone their cerebral skills to a razor's edge.
QuBowl uses a digital format to provide practice questions, player evaluations, study aids and training for students participating in quiz bowl competitions. It's something that's been a long time coming, according to company co-founder and chief technology officer, Blake Puryear.
"It's shocking that no one had done it before," he said.
Despite being a competition designed to challenge the smartest kids in the room, study methods and game preparation for quiz bowl participants were outdated and backward, co-founder and company CEO Will Gilbrech said. Primarily, students study questions that have shown up in other quiz bowl tournaments or pore over lists that cover the most-often asked topics.
In contrast, QuBowl turns the study process into a game, making it more fun, more efficient and more effective, he said.
The analytics offered by the QuBowl system are particularly helpful for coaches, Puryear said. The system can be used to determine a player's strengths and weaknesses by tracking his progress, and can be tailored to improve results in specific categories.
QuBowl offers a subscription service for individuals or schools. So far, 90 schools in 18 states have signed up, according to Gilbrech.
Two quiz bowl teams, typically consisting of up to four players each, compete against each other to answer questions in categories that include history, literature, science, fine arts, current events, sports and popular culture. The game is played by students at all levels, from the lower grades to college students.
A buzzer system is used to allow team members to interrupt the question if they think they know the answer. Correct answers score points, and the winner is the team with the most points at the end of the game.
John James, a doctor and e-commerce entrepreneur who co-founded Fayetteville-based Acumen Brands, has a passion for quiz bowl. James stepped down as CEO of Acumen, which includes the e-storefront Country Outfitters, in late 2014 after the company raised more than $100 million in investment funding.
In September, he founded Hayseed Ventures, which has a stake in QuBowl. Hayseed and QuBowl share work space in the old post office on the downtown square in Fayetteville.
James, who competed on the quiz bowl team of Benton High School, said the game gave him confidence. His first business, a quiz bowl question and study guide service that he ran from his dormitory room, helped pay his way through medical school. He said QuBowl has worked with intellectual powerhouses such as former Jeopardy champions to develop a state-of-the-art training tool for the game.
R. Robert Hentzel, president and chief technical officer of National Academic Quiz Tournaments LLC, said there are between 40,000 and 50,000 students who consider playing quiz bowl a significant activity in their lives. National Academic Quiz Tournaments is a major organizer of quiz bowl competitions around the country, and sells study aids and guides to players.
Hentzel said questions in quiz bowl tend to be about a paragraph in length and are layered in such a way that each successive sentence reveals more information about the correct answer. The first sentence might be a pretty obscure or arcane clue, while the last is fairly easy, a gimme question so to speak. That way, participants are rewarded for a depth of knowledge on a particular subject, he said.
He said the QuBowl platform seems to be useful in two ways. First, it can get students who are new to the game up to speed quickly. Second, the analytics should be a valuable tool for team coaches to assess their players and build teams that can capitalize on individual strengths while compensating for weakness in other areas, he said.
Carolyn Shry is state director of the Arkansas Governor's Quiz Bowl Association, an affiliation of the state's quiz bowl coaches. She agreed that being able to track a student's progress and abilities is important factor for quiz bowl coaches.
"Rarely do teams have a Renaissance man," she explained. "Mostly you have specialists."
Paul Mlakar, director of academic information systems, academic team coach and math teacher at St. Mark's School of Texas in Dallas, uses QuBowl as a training aid for the school's quiz bowl team.
He said developing study questions for quiz bowl is time-consuming and a product like QuBowl allows more time for actual study. The digital platform is particularly attractive to his students, he added, noting that if they have five minutes to spare they can log into QuBowl and practice.
"The ease of access is tremendous," Mlakar said.
He said the company is open to feedback and working to improve the product as it goes along. QuBowl's ability to adapt, add content regularly, and make it useful for newcomers but also challenging to top players will be key in its success and long-term viability, he said.
QuBowl's Gilbrech said the company is focused on adding questions regularly, hundreds each week, and he agreed that high-quality questions are difficult to construct but vital.
"We want our players to know that the questions they are answering are the very best," he said. "That's why our writing staff includes past winners of game shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire and state champion quiz bowl players."
Puryear said QuBowl is constantly striving to answer its own, difficult and multilayered question: "How do you make learning fun? How do you make it addictive?"
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