Trivia

Our team was spread around the east coast of Australia, from Townsville, to Melbourne, to the ACT. We quickly set to work trying to plan our events in a COVID world: what scientists we wanted to feature, how we could run the event safely, and most importantly, what kind of questions did we want to ask? Writing science-based trivia questions proved harder than we initially expected - our team was composed of biologists and chemists, so when it came to fun facts about engineering or laws we were rather stumped! Thanks to our collective love of science communication, and a few mild addictions to podcasts, we pushed through and came up with some we hoped the audience would love! Then came designing the night - working out the mechanism of the games and designing the visual look of the livestream. We particularly loved the “bee-ple” from #PintAU21’s artist in residence Phi Do; they’re sprinkled throughout both the shows, see if you can spot all 17 designs!

Hosting our Trivia event this year was the fantastic sci-commer Dr Shane Huntington and out-of-this-world astrophysics PhD student Kirsten Banks, who guided our teams through 30 questions based on the six Pint of Science themes. We had 35 teams playing our general trivia on the night, 19 of whom had played along with the Pint Challenge to gain some bonus points! Check out the Challenge posts below to see if you think you could have earned all 5 possible bonus points! 

The Big Pint Show was a new addition to Pint this year, inspired by shows like Spicks and Specks, the Big Fat Quiz, Countdown and QI. We had fun coming up with the design of the show, and were excited when 10 super-scientist public teams registered to receive the Big Pint Show questions early! The three teams that ended up submitting their own answers to us came up with some fantastic ideas that even the scientists didn’t think of on the night: our favourite was an answer to “work out how long a roll of TP is, but you aren’t allowed to unroll it”, which was “I would probably grab a piece of string that has the same thickness at the height of the one sheet, and try coil it in a manner, similar to the roll of TP. Once I’ve rolled it up to something that resembles the TP roll, I’ll unroll it and measure it.” Simple, practical, and no maths needed!

Hosting our brand new pint-size Big Pint Show was the singing immunologist Catriona Nguyen-Robertson and reporter from Behind The News, Cale Matthews, who guided 3 teams of Australia’s most science-y minds through 12 challenging and brain picking questions based on the six Pint of Science themes. Our teams were:

The Outliers, sustainable agriculture expert Prof. John Howieson, psychiatrist  Dr Joseph Carpini and entomologist Shasta Henry. 

Blood Mooners, chemical biologist Prof. Neil O’Brien-Simpson, immunology allergy expert Dr Dwan Price and mathematician Shezad Hathi. 

Dead Livers, nutritionist Prof. Lauren Ball, landscape ecologist Dr Renee Bartolo and human evolution expert Dr Yassine Souilmi. 

Ultimately, the Blood Mooners prevailed (perhaps helped by the blood moon that occured the night of the event), but all our teams brought excellent answers that attacked our questions from angles we hadn’t imagined!  Check out the recording of the livestream if you haven’t already!

We all feel we have learned a lot from volunteering with Pint of Science this year; how to reach out to scientists, plan a nationwide event, used new systems such as Google Forms and OBS.Ninja, and how to write hard trivia questions (and have fantastic fun watching all the other events from #PintAU21!). We look forward to helping Pint grow into the future - #PintAU22 can’t come soon enough! 

Favourite moment from Pint of Science 2021

Team’s overall favourite: Catriona’s spectacular song to wrap-up the Big Pint Show 

Rachel: Kirsten using her head to measure the size of a Pint of Science pint glass for one of our trivia questions!

Benny: The discussion between scientists on the show. Also, loved the public’s engagement with answering the Trivia as well as show questions!

Tess: Tuning in to each teams whiteboards and sussing their drawing skills during Big Pint Show 

Special Thanks to: 

Ali, who helped with fact checking and refining the questions.

Bec who put together the Pint Challenge.

Tom, Jirana, Chanel, Bella, Jin-oh and the rest of the central team; who provided so much help and support in the planning and execution of the events.

Jill, who had to leave us early (to have a baby!) but helped so much in the early coordination and preparation of both events. She also provided technical assistance on the night (along with Brod).

And of course, special thanks again to our MCs, Scientists and those who played along at home. Without you we could not have done these events, you were all out-of-this-world!  

For all those curious, here were the final scores for all Trivia teams, including those who just participated in the Pint Challenge! Marks for those who submitted to the Big Pint Show are included as well! (Scores may be slightly different to ones announced on the night due to re-checking of answers after the event).

If you liked Pint of Science this year, please consider donating so we can keep our festival running!  

Rachel, Benny & Tess

Pint Trivia team, 2021

General Trivia  

Big Pint Show - Public Submissions

Big Pint Show - Scientist Teams