PACE Outreach--Mentors and Newsletter

[Stained Diviner]

The PACE Outreach Committee is working on a few projects, two of which are ready to go.

One is a mentoring program for female and nonbinary members of our community. We are pairing up people who want to mentor with people who want a mentor. You can sign up to be a mentor or to be mentored by using this form. If you fill out the form, please expect to wait about 2-3 weeks before hearing from us. The form was started by Olivia Lamberti and Chloe Levine.

We have also created a newsletter that will soon be emailed to coaches and school administrators. You can view it here. Thanks to Samir Sarma for help with formatting.

[i never see pigeons in wheeling]

The newsletter looks excellent—it is good at the message it conveys. A couple more things I would do are to plug Quizbowl 101 harder so teams visit the PACE website and see the other introductory resources.

I’d also put a couple examples of a super basic tossup and bonus so administrators don’t have to rely on a description of what they look like. I think the visual impact of the pedagogical value can be more coherent if they have an idea of what they’re looking at in the Protobowl image. This might be an idea for the next issue, but I was thinking of printing a tossup (perhaps on George Washington) with different colored highlights of each clue, with a dialogue box next to each section saying “you learn this in college history,” “you learn this in APUSH,” “you learn this in regular US history,” “you learn this in middle school,” right up until the giveaway. Similar concept with easy, medium, and hard parts of a bonus (perhaps in math).

We should also think about if we can use the Ken Jennings tweet about qb, although it has the undesirable property of saying “play qb instead of learning to code,” which is not the best message we’d want to convey.

[Wartortullian]

We should also think about if we can use the Ken Jennings tweet about qb, although it has the undesirable property of saying “play qb instead of learning to code,” which is not the best message we’d want to convey.

I mean, as someone who learned more useful things from quizbowl than from an entire CS major...

[Stained Diviner]

Both links have been changed a couple of times, and they should now work for everybody. If you are having technical problems, let me know.

If you signed up for the mentoring program, you should now have a mentor or mentee, though currently there are a couple of people who signed up to be both mentors and mentees who are only in one of those roles. If you have not signed up but want to, it's always a good time.