Academic Games

     Ecole Classique has the enviable honor of being the school with the most successful Academic Games program in the United States, since the program started at the school in 1994. The program has garnered eight national sweepstakes championships in that span of time—something no other single school has achieved in any similar ten-year period! The sweepstakes championship is awarded to the team that is the best overall Academic Games team in the nation, across all disciplines. Ecole has won the sweepstakes titles in the Middle Division (grades 7-8) on four consecutive occasions: 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998.  They won the Junior Division sweepstakes (grades 9 and 10) in 1999 and repeated in 2000; and they won the Senior Division sweepstakes (grades 11-12) in 2000, and again in 2001. Ecole's coach and director for Academic Games, Mr. Don Shannon, is the only Academic Games coach in the history of the national program to have coached national sweepstakes champions in all four divisions. If that isn't enough, the teams from Ecole, across all divisions, have amassed more than 500 trophies in the past eight years for various team and individual titles at the National Tournament; included in that feat were several individual sweepstakes champions, and the first ever $6,000.00 Leslie Nielson Scholarship Award won by Ecole's Casey Winters at the 2001 tournament.

      The program consists of study and creative problem solving strategies employed in competing against other teams in games involving the disciplines of language, social studies, logic and math. The language games are Linguishtik, which requires a command of English grammar and vocabulary, and Propaganda, which involves listening, logic and auditory discrimination skills. The math games are Equations, which entails command of the concrete mathematical principals including all operations, logarithms, base arithmetic, modular arithmetic, and roots and powers for all number systems, and On-Sets, which involves intricate manipulation of the abstract, and command of set notation. The social studies games include Mr. President, which involves a complete command of American history and the biographies and administrations of all 43 US Presidents, and the game Worldcard, which involves familiarity with all global and national current events for the current year, and an in-depth study and research on a topic that varies from year to year. Some of the topics Worldcard has had since Ecole has been in the program have included: US Geography, The American Revolution, US inventors and their inventions, World War I, and Ancient Greece. The logic game is called Wff'N Proof, and it involves the highest level use of abstract concepts in creating a logical "proof" through a presented premises that can be shown to follow steps of logic in attaining an established goal.  This is shown using symbolic representations known among logicians as "propositional calculus."

      Ecole Classique has participated in all seven of the games in the program, and has, at one time or another, won multiple national championships in every game in which they play. The students practice and have mock competitions at school for the different games throughout the school year. They attend the National Tournament, which is held at the Rock Eagle 4-H center in Eatonton, Georgia, every year, and always return with armloads of trophies. Coach Shannon attributes the success of Ecole teams to the dedication, hard work and effort of the participants who must find the time to hone their academic skills many years in advance of their chronological age. Ecole fields teams in all four divisions. Practice sessions for the different divisions vary from year to year; but the high schoolers are allowed to include them in the ACE (Accelerated Curricular Enrichment) program, offered as a high-school course in grades 9-12. The course is fully accredited and taught by Mr. Shannon who is a certified teacher of the gifted and talented through grade twelve.