How the Olympic Challenge works

Fanschool games
4 min readDec 31, 2017

(See the current Olympic Challenge at https://go.fan.school/olympics)

The 2018 Winter Olympics are in PyeongChang, South Korea this February 9–25. Sign up now for our “Olympic Challenge” game at fanschool.org/olympics and get your predictions submitted by the end of primetime Opening Ceremony on February 9th!

You can play with your friends, family, club, or classroom as we all compete for global competence! Everyone will have 3 weeks before the Opening Ceremony on February 9th to submit predictions.

The following prizes for families and clubs especially are generously provided by NBC’s SportsEngine, which is the best solution for managing your sports organization and finding new youth sports to play:

  • 5 families will receive a Fandango Dinner & Movie package.
  • 1 sports club will receive a $1,000 gift card for equipment at your local sporting goods store.
  • 1 winner will receive a Team USA / Olympics engraved iPad.
  • 1 winner will receive Team USA Winter Essentials gear (hat, gloves, scarf, and jacket).

All students and teachers will also be eligible to enter a giant, public FANschool league to learn alongside classrooms across the country and compete for additional scholarship $$$!!!

As always, we’re curating the best teaching and learning resources to use alongside the game to help everyone dive into the geopolitics and history of the Korean Peninsula as well as learn more about what’s happening around the world.

The Olympic Challenge is similar to the Election Challenge we ran last school year — Here’s how that turned out!

Our “Challenge” games are a little different from our “FANgames”…

While FANgames are more like fantasy sports leagues for countries or states, Challenge games are more like prediction contests for events — Picture a March Madness-like game where players research and select countries in a series of rounds, but with a world map instead of a bracket.

Here’s how each round will work:

ROUND 1 will get you researching and predicting which Winter Olympics countries will be in the news most.

You’ll click to select 5 countries that you anticipate will make the most news during the Olympic Games, receiving 1 point for each mention of that country in the New York Times.

You cannot select South Korea or the United States here since host South Korea will get too many mentions and we use U.S. news to score (+ we want you to learn more about the rest of the world :).

Should I have Germany on my list?

Will North Korea make the news as much now that they’ve joined forces with South Korean athletes?

ROUND 2 will get us all researching and predicting which Winter Olympics countries will win the most medals.

In this round, you will choose 10 countries that you think will win the most medals.

And you’ll receive 30 points for each gold medal, 20 points for each silver medal, and 10 points for each bronze medal.

Did you know that Pyeongchang will be the first-ever Winter Games city to award over 100 gold medals?!

(Quick! Search “best performing countries in the Winter Olympics”…)

There are only 3 countries in the world that have won more medals in the Winter Games than they have in the Summer Games: Who are they?

The final ROUND 3 will have you rank your Round 2 picks from 1–10 in terms of TOTAL medals won.

You will receive 10 extra points for having your top 10 countries in the correct order, from highest to lowest.

Will Norway, who has more gold than any other country, finish with the most medals overall?

Who hosted the last Winter Olympics in 2014 and which country won the most medals there?

Oh, wait… Are they even in the Olympics this year?

Start studying now!

You can edit your Olympic Challenge entry until the end of the primetime Opening Ceremony on February 9th.

And you can follow league scores, updates, family banter, and world news in your challenge dashboard throughout the entirety of the Games!

Here are a few other fun story lines to research:

Will an African country win a medal this year?

Will any tropical countries win medals this year?

Who will win more medals: the United States or Canada?

What country other than your own are you rooting for?

Let’s Play!

fanschool.org/olympics

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Fanschool games

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