Texas Quiz Bowl Camp

The heart of the educational experience at Texas Quiz Bowl Camp is its curriculum. We are proud of the fact that our camp and our curriculum is the only one in the nation with a proven track record of success. Our curriculum began as a five-year study plan and team building effort that propelled Texas A&M University to a “shock title” at the 2006 ACF National Championship. Since the camp’s founding in 2009 our campers and their teams have won 12 national tournaments.

The knowledge core of the TQBA camp experience is based on the Texas Quiz Bowl database of questions, the largest of its kind with more than a quarter million tossups and bonuses. The Texas Quiz Bowl Camp Catalog is a product of the Texas Quiz Bowl database. In fact the course numbers closely parallel the numerical codes used to organize the thousands of questions.

Over the years, more than 200 tournaments have been divided into tossup and bonus sections, parsed for efficiency, tagged for splitting, coded for categorization, and allocated into text documents representing more than 100 sub-distributions. Each May and June, TQBA camp staffers use these documents as the base from which camp course days are created. Annually Texas Quiz Bowl Camp distributes more than 1000 pages (80 themes of 13 pages for 16 classes) of tossup study material to its campers.

For every student TQBA camp offers a complete tour of the cognitive universe encompassed by the game of quiz bowl. Knowledge is taught primarily in our tossup sections each of which features approximately 500 questions that are learned most efficiently in focussed sets were patterns are most discernible.

Bonus sections take a more wide view of the quiz bowl knowledge universe and allow students to build sound team strategies while honing their knowledge base. Study skills sections help younger and less experienced students gain an understanding of the quiz bowl learning processes through an intense focus on very specific knowledge area. Lecture sections allow students to delve more deeply into specific areas with expert presenters while strategy discussions allow a student to ask any general questions about the game or the camp.