By Gabriella Payne
Everybody loves a bit of trivia right?
Well it certainly seems that way in the Pakenham community, as what started as a little online trivia night within one primary school community has quickly spread throughout the local area and turned into a trivia extravaganza!
Each Wednesday night at about 7pm, hundreds of families from across the shire have been setting up their laptops and putting their thinking caps on to take part in a family-friendly quiz night, organised by the team at John Henry Primary School.
Brent Andrews, the head of health and physical education at JHPS is one of the driving forces behind the trivia night and said that he came up with the idea as a way of “bringing a bit of happiness to people” during these challenging times.
“So it actually began last year when we first got put into online learning,” Mr Andrews said.
“We wanted a way to still connect with all the students all together, and we thought a fun way to do that might be with a quiz.”
Using WebEx, Mr Andrews set up the online quiz night and students, teachers, parents and siblings from the school all quickly started showing their support for the idea.
Having proved incredibly popular within their school, word started getting out and bit by bit, more schools began to ask if they could join in.
“We’ve gotten bigger and bigger now,” Mr Andrews said.
“We’ve started connecting with our south east schools region, so that’s been really, really good actually.”
“People can join in for a laugh and a good time, in a semi-competitive manner too, but there’s still a bit of learning as well which is great.”
At the most recent trivia night, Mr Andrews estimated that about 12 – 13 schools from the region took part in the online quiz and he said it’s been fantastic to see so many new families taking part each week.
“It’s just a great way for people from all different schools to connect and come together,” he said.
“We’ve had a lot of different principals contact our school recently about how to join in, so I guess we are locked in now! I think we will continue with it for a while, that’s for sure.”
So far, the JHPS mass trivia night has covered a range of topics including famous families, video games, children’s books, geography, food and cartoons to name a few – and they are always brainstorming new ideas!
To get involved, Mr Andrews told families to visit the John Henry Primary School Facebook page, where a link to the online quiz is posted each Wednesday – and new families are always welcome.
