Trivia @ WiDS PS 2025
Hi friends,
This is Kelly. I had the pleasure of playing “game master” for our trivia session on Friday. It was a fun experiment, both in developing the game and seeing it play out. I hope that you had the chance to learn new things about one another.
Below, I’ll share some of the data we collected.
If you weren’t able to play, or if you have blocked the conference chaos from your memory, the slides above feature the questions we asked.
Round 3
I’m starting with this round because it has the interesting data.
We asked each table to share the list of countries visited by team member, as well as what languages are spoken by team members. Check out the resulting word clouds!
Given that this conference took place near Seattle, I am going to guess that the number of people who have been to the United States was under-reported.
We gave 1 point per language, and 1 point per 5 countries visited.
We also asked teams to determine which two members were born farthest apart, and calculate the distance between the birth places.
Some data highlights:
Table 16 had members who spoke English, French, Japanese, German, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Azerbaijani.
Tables 14 and 17 tied for the highest number of countries visited, each with a total country count of 47
Table 13 had team members born 10,000 miles apart (the maximum possible distance is 12,450)
Round 2
Enter the hard questions! The teams had to match 6 names of women to their historic accomplishments, and had to place 6 events in chronological order.
The team earned one point each for matching Valentina Tereshkova, Emily Roebling, Marie Curie, Grace Hopper, Amelia Earhart, and Margaret Hamilton to their accomplishments. The average score for this section was 4.75.
The interesting part here was deciding how to score the chronological question. ChatGPT recommended Kendall’s tau, and that turned out to be a sensible suggestion. I calculated the metric and multiplied by 10. Luckily, no one earned a negative score!
Table 11 had a perfect score in this round!
Round 1
This round was quick and simple.
What is the total number of WiDS Puget Sound conferences that your table members have attended? (Virtual counts… so does today! )
These answers ranged from 5 to 30 (thanks to the table of our volunteers). 8 out of 19 tables appeared to be entirely made up of first time attendees. WELCOME!
We divided by 5 and rounded to the nearest integer to assign points.To the nearest 5, how many guests have checked in today?
Guesses ranged from 110 to 300. The average guess was 179. The correct answer, at that time in the morning, was 145. (Another 40 people joined later in the day.)
We gave 2 points for a perfect guess, and 1 point for guesses within +/- 10.What year was the first Women in Data Science conference held
Correct answer: 2015
19 of 21 teams got this right. The others just needed more coffee.What is the name of the nonprofit started to support WiDS Puget Sound?
Correct answer: Diversity in Data Science
20 of 21 teams got this right. Good job!