500 students in WHS House Quiz

Quiz organisers:
From left Raoul Sarup (Head of Academia), Owen Parkinson, Luke Forrester, George Iliffe, Brady Sui, Yolanda Zhao.
Front row from left, Pravinesh Dayal, Alexandra Nicoloff, Sarah Torrie, Natasha Khan, Rhea Colaabavala (Head of Academia), Linda Hardcastle (Teacher in charge).

Whanganui High School introduced the House system to the school this year to promote friendly rivalry between four Houses. That rivalry tends to focus on athletics and swimming championships, but last Friday there was an academic contest - a Quiz involving 500 students as competitors plus other students and teachers as markers, in the organisation.

It was the idea of the two Heads of Academia - Raoul Sarup and Rhea Colaabavala. Rauol said, “We thought it would be really cool. It would promote inclusivity.” So, they gave a ‘13 page presentation’ to the senior management who liked the idea.

Rhea says, “The planning took two to three months.” They made presentations to school assemblies and encouraged students and teachers to come up with teams of up to five. It succeeded. They eventually had 100 teams, 25 each from the four Houses. There were point incentives if the teams were a mixture of year levels and/or from one of the vertical form classes. 

While the school has had evening quiz sessions, they had never done anything like this before. Principal, Martin McAllen said that he had never come across one so large in his educational experience.

The teams were encouraged to wear their House colours and were seated in House areas. However, to ensure fairness, the markers came from different Houses. 120 desks were transferred to the Jubilee Stadium and 40 chairs, encouraging participants to stand or kneel together. 

As for the questions Raoul explained, “Each academic prefect was assigned a category and was asked to ensure there were enough questions suitable for everyone.” Rhea added, “They were then checked and cross-checked for both the wording and the answers.”

Raoul and Rhea went out to the community to get some sponsored prizes and Whitakers and Mars came to the party or at least the quiz, with enough spot prizes to cover everyone.

There were ten rounds, with a break for some entertainment, after round five. The rounds were – Music, Science, General Knowledge, Geography, Fill in the Lyric, Logo’s, Literature, Film and TV, Sport and Current Events.

As for the 1000 students who were not part of the quiz? They remained at the school doing normal school work. Expect even greater numbers to volunteer for the 500 spaces next year.

Rhea wanted to thank everyone involved in the organisation but especially Head of Tecnology, Craig Adams, who designed and built a beautiful trophy for the winners.