ThinkFast Interactive Game Show

On the first Saturday night of the school year, Grainger was completely packed with groups of friend crowding around clickers, arguing over which button to click. From the loudspeakers, DJ Crossfire blasted a mashup of EDM songs. One could feel the energy of a room full of Exonians, intent upon winning gift cards, cash or Grill bucks in the trivia game ThinkFast.

“I went with three other friends from Lamont; we all formed a group and sat together,” upper Annabelle Lee said. “We went last year and I thought it was really fun because of the intensity of the trivia questions and the hand-out remotes, so I dragged my friends to the event again.”

ThinkFast is an interactive game show developed by production company TjohnE in 1997, with the goal of building an entertaining and educational event for college communities; it is currently run by a group of producers who split off into teams that tour the United States. “The concept of ThinkFast is interactive engagement with everyone in the crowd. It has been rated the most engaging game show in the US,” DJ Crossfire said.

Crossfire has been with the team since August of this year. “I’m on the East coast tour which is shorter, but ThinkFast does 1000 shows per year roughly,” he said. “Every show is different, and I like to change things up a little. I do research about each school or college, and my goal is to get people as excited as possible.” Aside from the trivia questions, the event also includes a dancing, singing and two acting challenges for randomly chosen teams.

This was the fourth time that Student Activities organized the annual ThinkFast game show, although the event was moved from February to the first weekend of the school year. “I think the energy at the beginning of the school year is better with the new students who are not yet jaded checking every Exeter email,” said Kelly McGahie, assistant director of Student Activities.

McGahie learned about ThinkFast Interactive from a convention with other independent schools’ student activities directors, and decided to bring the event to Exeter because of the stellar reviews. “The idea was that it’d be a lot of fun, high energy, and tie into what’s important to the Academy, things that students like,” she said. In order to achieve this, she added trivia questions related to PEA history and sought out gift cards from popular places in town like Stillwells and D2. Another change McGahie made this year was making it compulsory for students to compete in teams rather than individually.

Although Lee’s team from Lamont hovered around 8th place for most of the game show, they all thoroughly enjoyed the event. Claudia Sanchez, the team’s captain, commented, “There were some questions about Exeter which a lot of people didn’t know, like in what year was the tuition $250, or where [Mark] Zuckerberg’s dorm was.”

For Lee, the most interesting component of the game show was when teams were asked to guess how others in the room answered. “There was this question, ‘What do you not wash as much as you should’,” she laughed. “The answer was ‘bedsheets’.” Unfortunately, no one from her team was picked out for the dancing or singing challenges this year, but she is determined to participate in these activities next time around as well.

Julia Vilela, a new upper from Brazil, participated in the event with a group of mostly new international students. Despite saying that the game was too competitive for players from different teams to connect well with each other, Vilela thought the format was great for “bonding with people within your team.” She commented, “Everyone was so into it because the questions were very engaging, with topics such as music and pop culture. We lost; we were 29th out of 33 teams, but we had a lot of fun.”

Vilela’s team member, new senior Rina Kawagishi, similarly thought the event was very entertaining because of the intense atmosphere. Kawagishi and Vilela appreciated the presence of DJ Crossfire and his electronic mix. “I liked how they tried to keep us entertained with the video and the music and created opportunities for students to do things like sing and dance,” she said.