<p>Any tips?</p>
<p>There’s a lot of ways to study. The main thing I did was just watch Jeopardy each night. I’ll also sometimes just click on the “random article” button on Wikipedia until I find something interesting. Sometimes, though, the best way to prepare for it is just do well in class. A lot of the stuff at our quiz bowl was little details in some of my classes.</p>
<p>Can you tell us what quiz bowl competitions you’re doing or where you are? That might give me more information to help you better.</p>
<p>My kid was pretty good (finished #3 individually in our state her senior year). She attended ACE Quiz Bowl camps for a couple of summers, that was a huge boost. Not just the one week of intense QB, but the handouts on frequency of use of various things like literary works, art work, etc. She also kept flash cards on her computer, I think she used something called Genius (?), and spent a lot of time going through those. She would add material from camp, QB practice, classes, internet articles, whatever. And buzzer speed… practicing a lot on that with her team on that. If your team doesn’t have a couple of decent buzzer systems for practice, you might want to do a team fundraiser or two to raise the money for them.</p>
<p>My team doesn’t really attend any big name competitions. We practice to compete on a local show against a lot of other schools in the area. I’d prefer not to go into too much detail about that for privacy reasons. We do have a buzzer system we use at practice and also split up into teams and do practice questions as if it was the real show. </p>
<p>Okay thanks that’s good enough. Most tv shows are the same across North America; they generally involve short “buzzer beater” style question that emphasize how fast you can press the buzzer. So in that vein, practicing your reaction time is you can do to improve. I feel obligated to tell you, however, that you’re definitely selling yourself when your team only does the tv competition, there is other quiz bowl out there is much more educational and quite frankly more interesting.</p>
<p>Anyhow, intparent has some good advice that I’ll expand upon. Since quiz bowl likes to ask things over and over again, learning every old question is a good way to improve. Other flash card programs you can use include Anki, Mnemosyne, Genius and other out there. In fact if you look up “quiz bowl” on quizlet, there are a ton of free flash cards Just a word of warning however, doing the random Wikipedia search, as folkiestcat suggest, is pretty fun and all, but it ain’t to useful for coming up with good knowledge for quiz bowl unfortunately.</p>
<p>To avoid creating a wall of text, here are a couple of links that have more information:
<a href=“Tips for Improving – Missouri Quizbowl Alliance”>http://www.moqba.org/tips.php</a>
<a href=“NAQT | Improving as a Player”>http://www.naqt.com/HowTo/improve-as-a-player.html</a>
<a href=“Improving as a Player - Olympia Academic Competition Questions”>http://www.olympiaquestions.com/improving-as-a-player-and-as-a-team.html</a>
<a href=“http://aceqb.com/improve/study-guides/”>http://aceqb.com/improve/study-guides/</a>
<a href=“List of Essential Resources (alpha) - The Quizbowl Resource Center”>List of Essential Resources (alpha) - The Quizbowl Resource Center;
<p>Bottom line is just keep on working at it, and you’ll win your tournament in no time. Feel free to pm me if you have any questions.</p>
<p>My son wants to do quiz bowl this summer, but his June - July is all filled up. Can anyone recommend a quiz bowl camp in August? I checked ACE, but they have them only in June and July.</p>
<p>The truth is there really aren’t any quiz bowl camps other than ACE. However, if you’re in or near Texas or Arkansas, there are camps in those states too. Texas Quiz Bowl Alliance’s award winning summer camp runs in College Station from July 27th through August 1st, yes slightly out of you’re threshold, but it may be an option. Arkansas’s camp, I find out after I started this post, is actually in the fall. Also, since the Arkansas’s Quiz Bowl Association promotes speed check quiz bowl, I’m not necessarily sure if you’re son would benefit from attending their camp other than as a leisurely diversion. Hope this was helpful!</p>
<p>@Rockymtnhigh1
Thanks a ton!! I’m not exactly sure why we only compete on the t.v show. I think it’s just always been that way with the advisor. I love my team and quiz bowl overall but I think we would need a lot more practice first before trying to take on something bigger. </p>
<p>Another quizbowler! (quiz bowl ftw)
I just read Wikipedia, though how to improve depends on the subject. For science, i’ve found studying the stuff for school is helpful ( for example HSNCT was a week before SAT Bio, so I was studying lots of Bio and as a result powered some Bio tossups 
). reading wikipedia is most helpful for history, reading about Turkey and Ataturk helped me power Mustafa Kemal at HSNCT </p>
<p>Reading Wikipedia does indeed help! I like to jump articles when I read; I’ll start on an article, then click a key word/event that I find interesting which will then link to that article and so forth. It’s probably really tedious for most people – if it’s boring for you, you’ll probably not retain the information and should probably find another way, but it was pretty helpful for me.
If you don’t already, I can tell you that watching Jeopardy when it comes on every evening definitely helps too with random trivia. Fun stuff.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>