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Teen to compete in national academic-games tournament
The Vindicator (Youngstown)
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Travis Court, 15, will travel from his Ellwood City, Pa., home to Florida, where he will compete in a national LinguiSHTIK tournament. LinguiSHTIK is a game that focuses on sentence composition, grammar, vocabulary and spelling.
The Vindicator (Youngstown)
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Travis Court, 15, right, qualified to go to a national Academic Games Leagues of America tournament this year. Pictured with him are his mother, Betsy Court, and his brother Josh, 20, at their Ellwood City, Pa., home.
The Vindicator (Youngstown)
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Travis displays dice from a LinguiSHTIK game. LinguiSHTIK is one of six academic games provided at the Academic Games Leagues of America tournament.
By Jeanne Starmack
ELLWOOD CITY, Pa.
Travis Court is a smart guy.
If you know what kind of a noun “smart guy” is without having to look it up, you could maybe take on Travis in the language game LinguiSHTIK — one of six academic games at which he’s quite proficient.
To put that in a basic subject-verb-object sentence pattern: Travis kicks butt. He’s played the games since third grade with other students in the Ellwood City School District’s gifted program. Now in ninth grade at Lincoln High School, he’s so practiced at them that he’s qualified to go to a national Academic Games Leagues of America tournament this year.
“I like doing them,” Travis said. “But you have to work hard,” he added, because opponents get smarter, and the rules get more complicated every year.
The six academic games, provided by the AGLOA, are LinguiSHTIK, On-SETS, Propaganda, Equations, Presidents and World Events.
Players can be any stu-dent in fourth through 12th grade, but they are mostly gifted students. The games teach concepts in math, language arts and social studies.
LinguiSHTIK, for example, focuses on sentence composition, grammar, vocabulary and spelling. It looked like a friendly little game on the kitchen table at Travis’ Ellport, Pa., home last week, with its playing board and its letters etched on cubes.
But it’s not your grandmother’s Scrabble. Three players try to outwit one another. They choose a sentence pattern, a part of speech and how to use it, and they can make demands as the game goes on about the part of speech and the sentence.
Flexibility is important as the demands continuously change on the players, said Jonica Walters, coordinator of Ellwood’s gifted program.
“You have three people trying to make words and make a sentence, and whoever can do that wins,” Travis summed up.
Travis plays in the Midwestern Intermediate Unit IV League, which includes kids from Lawrence, Butler and Mercer counties. They play one another in six local tournaments at Slippery Rock University. There also is a regional competition in March at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., said Walters. At the regional tournament, the MIU IV League plays leagues from Beaver and Allegheny counties.
“To get to nationals, you have to be undefeated in two games,” explained Travis’ mother, Betsy. Participation in the regional tournament isn’t necessary if the player is undefeated twice in local tournaments.
Travis is undefeated locally in LinguiSHTIK and in On-SETS, which is based on the mathematics of set theory.
So if the school district approves the trip, he will go to Kissimmee, Fla,, in April to the national AGLOA tournament. He’ll compete in the junior division, for ninth- and 10th-graders.
It won’t be his first time there. He competed in the tournament’s elementary division for fourth- through sixth-graders in Orlando, Fla., three years ago.
He played four games — LinguiSHTIK; On-SETS; Equations, which involves math problem-solving; and Propaganda, which teaches students to recognize persuasion techniques from advertising and politics.
He did well — his Equations team placed second out of approximately 15 teams. In Propaganda, he placed 13th out of about 200 players.
He was almost undefeated in On-SETs. “I missed by 2 points,” he said.
Travis is the only Ellwood student qualified for the national tournament so far this year. Walters said that 10th-grader Matthew Barnes placed first there last year in Presidents and World Events, and he’ll go again if he qualifies locally.
“We haven’t had the social studies events yet,” she said.
Three other students who are undefeated in one game only still have time to qualify, she said.
The gifted program isn’t all games for Travis. He takes 10th-grade honors classes including chemistry, geometry and Spanish.
He wants to study science in college, though he hasn’t narrowed down a field. He is a smart-enough guy to know that a predicate noun is a noun or noun phrase that describes or identifies a sentence’s subject noun.
“Obviously, we’re very proud of him,” said his father, Scott.