ThinkFast Interactive Game Show
Grainger Auditorium hosted Saturday night’s ThinkFast Interactive Game Show, an live trivia game with a variety of questions and prizes for audience contestants. Trivia ranged from pop culture to scientific topics, asking students to identify a recently released music video or the outermost layer of the sun. The wide-ranging subject matter and fast pace of the game, which has been a hit on college campuses nationwide, drew a crowd of Exonians eager to challenge themselves.
ThinkFast, the self-proclaimed “most awarded interactive program ever,” was created in 1995, and its owner, TjohnE College Entertainment Company, tours five productions of ThinkFast year-round. It has visited several major universities and community colleges from coast to coast, including NYU, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Colgate, Columbia and many others. TjohnE credits the program’s high popularity to the concept of wirelessly connecting an online virtual audience to the game with those attending the actual event acting as the contestants, either in teams or as individuals.
In recent years, the ThinkFast tour group has performed its show at over 600 colleges per year, rotating topics to reflect current pop culture. The show’s operation remains wireless, with the audience’s attention drawn to the large video screens located on either side of the main stage. Various sound effects, videos and questions are shown to the audience on the large screens. ThinkFast also provides an “age relevant” host for each of its programs, meaning that the hosts are selected to match the age of their target audiences in order to allow more favorable audience identification and to guide participants more easily through the show.
“I honestly couldn’t have cared less about the money,” he said. “It was a lot of fun hanging with my friends in the audience and doing trivia.”
Assistant Director of Student Activities Kelly McGahie helped organize the ThinkFast event on campus, having learned about it through other independent schools. As for the timing of this year’s ThinkFast event, McGahie explained that many students were absent from campus this weekend, requiring more programming from the Academy for the students who remained.
“It was college admissions weekend, so the majority of the uppers were busy Friday night,” she explained. Though many of the college admissions events were completed by Saturday, “on the night of the event, a lot of uppers will be out of the town with their parents, so it’s almost like losing a whole class.” In contrast to the Abbot Casino and ALES dance over the past two weekends, where both events were student organized and run either through dorms or clubs, there were fewer students this past weekend available to organize or host a student event. “I wanted to find an event that I could run myself that would hopefully appeal to the remaining students on campus,” McGahie explained.
Unlike the other events where faculty are often involved in the set-up and clean-up process both before and after the event, ThinkFast handles all of the logistics from start to finish. “I hire them, they come in and they do it all,” McGahie said.
Exeter has hosted ThinkFast for the past three years and will continue to do so in the future if the Student Activities Office receives positive feedback from the students this year. The Student Activities Office made strong efforts to publicize the event, with e-mails, an item in the school’s online calendar and posters around campus. The students who attended last year enjoyed it, and last year’s winner was eager to return to defend his title.
Prep Noah Lee learned about the event through the weekend activities email letter and attended with a large group of friends. Lee enjoyed answering the questions collaboratively with fellow students, and he was further motivated to attend after participating in quiz shows through the recently released quiz show app “HQ Trivia” as well as his participation in the Exeter Quiz Bowl Club. “I really liked the cash prize,” noted Lee, “and that was probably the main incentive for me to go. The $200 first prize could get you 400 grill cookies!”
Lower Helena Chen also attended the event after noticing it in the weekend programs email. “My friends and I were bored, so we decided to go check it out and see if it was fun,” Chen said. Simply answering the questions was Chen’s favorite part of the program. Similar to Lee, Chen had also been using the app “HQ” and has had previous interest in quiz shows.
This year’s ThinkFast winner was defending champion senior Nick Song. Unlike prior years in which larger teams of students shared the winning prize of $200 dollars, Song, the co-head of Exeter’s Quiz Bowl Club, was the sole victor. He attributes the majority of his success to being “fast on the buzzer” to give an answer. Despite his repeat win, Song remained humble. “I honestly couldn’t have cared less about the money,” he said. “It was a lot of fun hanging with my friends in the audience and doing trivia.”