Nerd Appreciation Night!

On Friday night, 21 people showed up for Nerd Appreciation Night. Nitha suggested this program to the Teen Advisory Board over the winter, and it was definitely a success. I guess you could call almost any program we do "Nerd Appreciation Night," but this one was special because it had such a wide variety of nerds!

Everyone picked a nerd nametag as they came in, or made their own. The list included fictional characters like Hermione Granger, Steve Urkel, Lisa Simpson, and Peter Parker, but also some real people like Ben Stein, Weird Al Yankovic, Tina Fey, and Susan Boyle. We played Simpsons Scene-It for about 15 minutes while everyone arrived.

Our major activity for the evening was the Battle of the Nerds. Nitha suggested that we should let everyone defend their nerdish passions, so I set up some NCAA-style brackets and filled in a Sweet Sixteen of nerds. We pitted nerd against nerd in one-minute rounds where each person had 30 seconds to talk about his/her chosen subject. The group voted for the winner of each round, who then moved on into a new bracket. We had a good mixture of guys and girls from a variety of backgrounds, so topics ranged from the expected (role-playing games, fantasy books/movies, writing, drama) to the far-out ("the human mind," "the multiverse theory"). Our final round ended up being Anas (physics) against Nitha (celebrity obsession), with Anas declared the victor for his rational descriptions of how physics is related to real life. Anas won a DVD of the SyFy channel's original miniseries Tin Man, a retelling of The Wizard of Oz.

We also did a nerd quiz slideshow, with a question for the whole group on each slide. People raised their hands to answer and won Nerds (of course) for correct answers. I tried to come up with questions for all kinds of nerds so everyone had an opportunity to win. Some of the questions asked for demonstrations, and that's where we met some true nerds. For example, you're probably a nerd of some type if you can do an actual card trick from memory!

We had chips and candy for snacks, and we watched a movie clip from Spaceballs and a few Monty Python sketches. We ran out of time for nerd media so we definitely have to do this again! We didn't even get to The Princess Bride, Lord of the Rings, or Napoleon Dynomite. Look for another Nerd Appreciation Night next year!