2018 Quebec’s Challenge Bowl

For the very first time, Quebec City hosted the Challenge Bowl, a Jeopardy-style geoscience game, and it was a big success. This first annual event took place at Laval’s University in Quebec City, on March the 16th. Four teams participated from both U-Laval and INRS universities. They competed for a trip to represent Quebec at the National competition in Calgary. Around 50 people, including students and teachers came to see the competition. A fun and exciting ambience could be felt all over the room. Students and teachers would try to answer the questions with passion, screaming and cheering at every round. Animated by Geneviève Fillion and monitored by Quebec’s SEG Student Chapter committee, Cecilia Dip, Shiva Tirdad and Simon Gernez the event took place in an organized and fair way. The winners of the competition were Jonathan Fortin and Véronik Lord from U-Laval, followed by Micha Horswill and Charles-Eli Mercier also from U-Laval.

Bringing the Challenge Bowl to Quebec is the result of the international character of Quebec’s SEG student chapter. Some members had already participated in such an event back in their home countries, or at finals at the SEG annual meeting. It was suggested that the Challenge Bowl is one way to make the chapter grow. We thought that by holding this event, we would be able to motivate students to participate more actively at chapter’s activities, and we could show them that geoscience word is not only serious staff. Also, we would be integrating this important part of Canada to an event known worldwide and provide them with the opportunity of knowing geoscience outside Quebec.

Organizing this event required a lot of hard work from our members, since we are such a small chapter, but we are happy about its result and we are more than inspired on continuing it. We would like to thank Instrumentation GDD Inc., GeoLearn and Quebec’s Hydrogeophysics Association for their financial sponsorship, and the CSEG for providing us with the game and for covering all our doubt – without their support this would not have been possible.