On April 14, 2017, my colleagues and I got an incredible opportunity to participate in the WorldQuest Trivia Competition, hosted at the Westminster College in Salt Lake City. Seven students, including Pierre Chesnais, John Cummings, Anthony Franks, Ruben Garces, Yelyzaveta Pashehenko, Tenika Ray, and me, represented the Department of History and Political Science at Utah Valley University in this competition.  Each of the team members excelled in various subjects and topics.

Wolverine Dream Team during competition

Thanks to Professor Hong Pang’s organization and guidance, we could participate in such a fun and engaging event hosted by the Utah Council for Citizen Diplomacy. Representatives from various organizations and institutions, including those from global corporations, communities and social organizations as well as students from universities/colleges (such as University of Utah, Brigham Young University, Weber State University, Westminster College, and our Utah Valley University), attended this event and competed with each other on world knowledge.  . The purpose of this event is to raise awareness of the current global issues we are facing and faced in the past.

The competition is to test the knowledge of the participants on the following topics:

• Global Megacities
• Women in Technology
• Peace & Conflict
• EU (European Union)
• Combating Infectious Diseases
• Current Events

Wolverine Dream Team with Professor Hong Pang

Personally I learned a lot from this Trivia Competition.  For example, global megacities are severely overpopulated and have created numerous problems to the communities. These problems includes water crisis, infrastructures crisis, unemployment, under-education, land pollution, land and waste management.  These problems are becoming serious issues to the people who live in the megacities. Each megacity contains at least 10 million people. This number is bigger than that of some small countries in Europe and Asia. The second round of questions about Women in Tech provided me eye-opening information that many successful companies exclusively rely on the women power. The third round of questions is about Peace and Conflict, another challenging topic. But our team began to roar with a stronger performance this round. We did even better in the fourth round on European Union because we had Pierre Chesnais, who comes from France and successfully nailed 8 out of 10 questions.

While we had a plain performance in the first 3 rounds getting the score of 14 out of 30, our team had a comeback in the later rounds, such as those on Current Events, Peace and Conflict, European Union, and Current Events. Although we failed to win any prize, our team tried our very best, had a lot of fun working together, and learned a lot about the world.

It was an enlightening opportunity for us to broaden our horizon of knowledge. Our engaged learning evening ended with a lot of laughter and good memories. Thanks to Professor Hong Pang and my colleagues, I have gained a good memory and experiential learning in my own way.

                        Munkhbat Batmunkh, member of Wolverine Dream Team

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STUDENT REFLECTIVE ESSAYS

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Tenika Ray: Experiential Learning Through  WorldQuest Trivia

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Anthony Franks: WorldQuest Trivia Night

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Ruben Garces: my participation in WorldTrivia contest

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