Re-Introducing Acadacathalonomania!

Throughout my current initiative to blog everyday, there have been moments where I blog about something and I feel like I touched on the subject/event a year or two ago (closer than when the actual story occurred in some cases). However, since I do talk about many things involving the students and the Academy, it doesn't hurt to have a refresher blog. Today's topic to re-introduce is Acadacathalonomania!

If you would boil down Acadacathalonomania (which I'm going to shorten to Acada for the rest of this entry), it comes down to adding as much randomness as possible into a day. Acada is a scavenger hunt, but the students get a list of not only things to find, but things to create, things to capture on video, and things to figure out. Here are some examples from today's event:

Find:  pre-made toast still in the packaging
Create: color worthy of the title "blellow"
Capture on Film: Give Margaret (one of the RCs) a puppet show while she works the front desk
Figure Out: If the RCs were part of the Avengers team, who would each RC be and why?

The full event is made up of two halves, and each half consists of the students getting a list of 42 items (heh) with a time slot of 3 hours 14 minutes (heh). The teams are either three or four students and in addition to the lists, there are other opportunities for points, like mid-event challenge activities and riddles that are emailed out to the teams. Acada is usually a full-day event, including a break between the halves for lunch. However, since there were several things going on this weekend, I planned for one half yesterday afternoon and the second half this evening. With all the lack of sleep from the senior trip and other events, I only had one team sign up for yesterday's half (so it was cancelled), but we did have four teams compete in tonight's half.

I got the original idea from an event called Tricadecathlonomania, which is Acada except stretched out to 288 items and a full 24-hours without stopping. The event took place in Minnesota (well, it branched out to Virginia, but it started with a group in MN), so I originally heard about it in college and while I wasn't able to participate, the idea stuck with me. After some forum searching just now, the most recent Trica stuff I could find was from 2010, which is when I started Acada. It looks like something happened and Trica fell out of the spotlight of epic scavenger hunts. Sad day.

When I was forming the idea for Acada, I looked at the old lists from Trica and tried to develop a feel for what would be good/bad for the list. Of course, there were some things that I knew wouldn't work for my students (for example, the students can't own cars, so that eliminates some items). On the other hand, I've been able to get away with many nerd references, since I've catered the event to the population here. The list for today was all cooked up in my own head, although I did have some inspiration from the students and random YouTube videos. There are a couple of items that are standard fair: be the first team to get me a specific random item, soda tabs, and that Final Countdown signals the end of the event. I did include a couple of nerdfighter references, and I feel like several students are nerdfighters because they've been adding references in that weren't on the list.

Events like Acada are definitely one of the reasons why I love the Academy. It's just so out of the ordinary and I think the students love the oddities that they are tasked to accomplish. Yes, it can be a long day, but the students have a lot of fun, even if it's finding a loophole in my system. (Overall, things like loopholes and exploits are welcome, especially because I can figure out if I want to keep it open the next time around.) If I stay in the Housing field, Acada would definitely be my answer to "What is an exciting program you've put on?" because it is more than just a movie or a guest speaker.

Oh, and I incorporated a daily holiday into Acada as well because one of the items was to get a poll on the students' favorite NASCAR driver since today is the Indy 500. Apparently, many students didn't care, which I'm not terribly surprised about. It's a shame that we didn't have more teams for yesterday's half of Acada because there were some amazing holidays: Towel Day, Frank Oz's birthday, heck, it was Nerd & Geek Pride Day yesterday. Huge opportunity missed. (Then again, I was originally trying to have Acada on May 4th - Star Wars Day - which is why this event's tagline was "Attack of the Public Domain Space Soldiers!". What can I say? I didn't want to deal with copyright, he jokingly responded.)

I'm certainly glad that tomorrow is another weekend day because I need to sink my teeth into my three projects again - grading Acada (especially since I want to announce the results soon), continuing my work on the Grad Banq PPTs, and grading assignments for Seminar/Colloquium. There are always some other projects and administrative work that I could be working on as well, but these are definitely the three that are the most time-sensitive. With that said, it's time to rest up. I hope you can do something special to commemorate Memorial Day tomorrow and as always, DFTBA.