Four students lined up, ready to answer the question, “What is the process that caused the concentration of a substance to increase as it moved up the food web? a. Absorption, b. Radiation, c. Transference, d. Bioaccumulation.” The GloBolles tapped the buzzer to answer, “D.” The teacher answered, “That’s correct!” and the practice continued.

The World Affairs Council (WAC) competition was on February 9th, from 5:30-8:30 at the UNF Adam W. Herbert University Center. Multiple teams from schools all across Jacksonville competed. Of those teams, three will be from Bolles, the GloBolles, the United Educations, and The Aukaravan.

Practice for the competition has occurred during activities where the three teams practice the mock competition in different scenarios. First, they practice with 15 seconds of discussion on multiple-choice questions. Then they go down to 10 seconds of discussion, then eight seconds.

In the competition, each team will be asked to answer a multiple-choice question based on a world topic. These possible topics could include “Economic Sanctions – A Double-Edged Sword” and “Great Decisions.”

The teams don’t know the topics ahead of time but are given study material that is connected to questions that the judges may ask. With this pressure and time crunch in competition, Aycart said, “Right now, we are working on the strategies that you are going to use in the competition.”

There are three things that the teams tried to focus on, “The import thing is that you are able to, A – talk to your team, B – not having one person who is going to take the lead and not talking with anyone else, C – to always talk with your team before responding,” Aycart said.

Some of the difficulties that can come from this factual and stressful competition can be that one person answers without consulting their team members, causing them to make a mistake.

Aycart said that when mistakes are made, “Make sure you are helping that person to get out of that hole really quick, because you want that person to still be engaged, instead of punishing her or him.”

A team member of the GloBolles, Madeline Kaiser ‘24 said, “I look forward to the opportunity to compete against other schools in the Northeast area.”

The teams competed at UNF Adam W. Hearst University Center, and although they did not win the competition, they increased their knowledge of global issues that are not highly known.