Tournament of Champions 2020 🏆
The Effects of Mandatory Social Interaction on the Relationships Between APASA Family Members by means of the Tournament of Champions
Bethany Lum1 & Colleen Feng2
1Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences - Human Biology, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2Department of Preventive Medicine, University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Introduction
Tournament of Champions (ToC) is an annual event hosted by the Internal Community Chairs of APASA. The goal is to bring both member organization representatives (member org reps) and APASA eboard members together in a fun social gathering to facilitate bonding and catalyze the growth of friendship.
Materials and Methods
For this event, we began planning way back in the early days of summer break. Since the state of the fall semester was not decided by USC until much later in the season, we struggled toggling between planning an in-person event or another long zoom social. Through bi-weekly zoom calls, we planned and gathered a numerous amount of potential icebreakers and games that could be played both in-person and online. Ultimately, we elected to host ToC online, a smart choice considering how the fall semester is going so far now…
- 10:30-10:35: Open Zoom
- Play background music
- 10:35-10:40: Introductions
- Go over run down of the day
- 10:40-11:10: Games for everyone
- Scavenger hunt (20 items)
- 11:10-11:40: Family bonding time
- Introductions and icebreakers
- 11:45-12:15: Lunch break
- 12:20-1:20: Family competition
- 1:20-1:30: Closing remarks
- Announce winning family and prizes
- Closing remarks
Figure 1. Overview of ToC listing exact time frames of each activity
Results
On the morning of September 5, 2020, at 10:30am, the event commenced with a warm welcome of “upbeat instrumental music” playing in the background, creating a fun and energetic atmosphere for the participants as they slowly wandered into the zoom room. We began with introductions and then swiftly transitioned into our first game: scavenger hunt. This game engaged many individuals who were conveniently located in their own bedrooms and kitchens, as we asked for participants to collect items such as a single (1) chopstick, a right footed house slipper, a plushy and more. However, one individual, Anne Gao from SASE, pulled ahead and won our scavenger hunt, winning herself a Starbucks gift card.
After the scavenger hunt, we finally reached the most special part of the day—meeting everyone’s APASA’s families! Families were paired into breakout rooms to officially meet and play ice breakers to get to know each other. Once everyone had time to meet their families, we took a quick lunch break where some participants actually stayed in the Zoom call and played Spyfall together, further strengthening their APASA bonds.
Afterwards, we had planned a friendly family competition of Jeopardy to win even more exciting gift card prizes; however, this activity was observed to be poorly designed for the group, as the APASA members proved to be too knowledgeable for the trivia questions (Fig. 2). The first family to answer had quickly cleared an entire category in record time, leaving the others with $0 in their pockets. Panicking behind the scenes through frantic private messages with each other, we had to immediately change the rules to allow every family to earn at least a few questions. Ultimately we had to forgo the jeopardy points and added a new game of Scribblio instead. For this game, we had one member representative from each family (Fig. 3) draw for the win. After seeing all the beautiful and creative drawings by our member org reps, the family that came in second place, winning a $10 Amazon gift card each, was Kiki, Bryan, Matthew, Kimberly, Gabe, and Richard. In first place, winning a $25 Ubereats gift card each, was Leon, Angela, Joseph, Lauren, Bethany, and Jessica.
Figure 2. The fateful Jeopardy board
Figure 3. Member organization representatives who participated in representing their family for the real final showdown (+ Colleen trying to figure out how to stream the game for everyone else without giving away her words).
Discussion and Conclusion
Based on our results, we can conclude with at least 95% certainty that the Tournament of Champions was a success. While there were some setbacks due to games being unexpectedly easy to win, the social allowed everyone to interact with one another in a space outside of GMs, laying the foundation for the tight-knit APASA community that we hope to build over the course of the year. Further experimentation could be conducted to determine other aspects of this experimental group; however, we would like to congratulate the winners of our competitions and thank everyone, both member org reps and APASA board members, for attending ToC, allowing us to still make this event possible even through the means of Zoom.