“What wavelength from the electromagnetic spectrum caused polar molecules to rotate?” Answer? Microwaves. This is a question that you could expect to be found in Knowledge Bowl.
Knowledge Bowl consists of nine teams competing in three different rooms, which are labeled as the first-place room, second-place room, and third-place room. Each of the nine teams starts
in one of the three rooms. Then, each team competes in each room to try to place first in that room and advance to the first-place room. In the room, there is also a judge and a reader. The reader reads the question number, the question, and the team that buzzed in first, second, and last. After a team buzzes in, they have ten seconds to talk about the answer, and then one second after the ten seconds to answer. However, it’s a “Paper and Pen”; they will have twenty seconds to discuss instead of just ten, but they still have to answer within one second. However, the team that buzzes in gets the question wrong, and another team buzzes in after them; that team gets a chance to answer. This time, they have to answer immediately with no time to discuss. If no other team buzzes in and the question wasn’t finished being read, the question is re-read, but only for the teams that haven’t buzzed in. After a total of sixty questions, the scores are compared.
The team with the most points goes to the first-place room, the team with the second most goes to the second-place room, and the team with the fewest points goes to the third-place room. This goes on for two rounds before going into a written round. In the written round, each team goes to an individual room where they have thirty minutes to answer sixty written questions. These questions are all multiple choice and are answered on, usually, a scantron. After each team is done with the written round, each team goes to the room they made their way to in the last oral round. After two more oral rounds, for a total of four oral rounds and one written round, the team scores are totaled and then compared. The three teams with the most points are the winners.
Many people have better or more elegant ways of explaining the Knowledge Bowl.
“Knowledge Bowl is an after-school club that competes against itself and other schools participating in Knowledge Bowl to correctly answer trivia-like questions.” Said Kannon Falken, a member of the Stevens Five Knowledge Bowl team. Augustus Harris, someone not on a knowledge bowl team, describes knowledge bowl as “different teams find out who has the best understanding of general and school knowledge.”
Knowledge Bowl allows for many great experiences. “One highlight from my years of doing Knowledge Bowl is seeing each generation of seniors before me rise up and answer so many great questions.” said Shourya Goyal, a member of Knowledge Bowl for five years. To this day, Goyal is a part of Team One at Stevens High School in Rapid City, SD.
Knowledge Bowl isn’t just about proving you’re smarter than everyone else, but also about hanging out with your friends and just talking about your random knowledge. “Knowledge bowl is an academic bowl thats held at the start of the school year at Stevens High school, and its just a competition where we can go and compete against other regional teams in temp of quiz bowl style questions and who ever buzzes first gets to answer first and we just get to test our knowledge against one another and just kind of see whose for fun the smartest.” Goyal said.
Knowledge Bowl’s main goal is to see who the smarties are, but also to just have fun while doing it.
If you want to come see what Knowledge Bowl is like for yourself, the finals for Rapid City Knowledge Bowl will be held on Saturday, November 8th, 2025, at Stevens High School.
