In the middle of the night, during a zoom call among some friends,
Lakshan: There are so many quizzes happening, shall we do a B99 quiz?
Theekshana: Yesssss!
I’m Rtr. Lakshan Banneheke, co-chairperson of Quarantine Heist, and that’s how all this began. The next morning when I woke up Theekshana had already texted the club secretary, Rtr. Thisura and gotten approval. We awaited Rtr. Sathma’s confirmation and by noon we were good to go. A Whatsapp group was made in a few hours but we still had no idea that it would turn out to be as big of a project as it did. Bear in mind that by 2pm on that day, this was still an infant idea! What happened next was quite simply astounding.
As customary in our club, so many club members joined in the conversation in the group wanting to help in any way imaginable. The title “Quarantine Heist” was unanimously agreed upon within minutes and by 4 pm Rtr. Nadun had made the very first promotional video which would mark the beginning of one of the best PR campaigns that I have ever seen. By the end of that one singular day, we had come up with the idea, gotten approval, decided on the title, decided on the platform, designed the registration form, assigned people to make questions, and also started our PR campaign.
Like I said, astounding!
It was amazing to see how everything just fell into the right place, that a simple idea over a Zoom call with a bunch of friends turned out to be.
I’m Rtr. Theekshana Gunasekara the co-chairperson of the project, once the question makers were assigned to each season to make questions, we started to binge-watch the seasons, it was a very nostalgic feeling, it felt like we started to watch our favourite show for the first time, it was a great feeling. A NOINE- NOINE feeling!
Immediately on the following day, we started to make a schedule to get everything on a timeline, and we started discussing the perfect date for the Heist and boom, It was Rtr. Nadun again with the perfect date idea, April 28th, the day Jake decided to propose to Amy. We started to make a timeline which at the end was filled with something to do every day and night. It was quite jam-packed with work that we had to do with all the university work we had, but here’s the best part, no matter what came up we will sort it then and there and we would actually be ahead of schedule. It was again a great feeling to see something that we put a lot of effort into actually finished sooner than expected. We were a day ahead of everything.
A couple of days later everyone including Me and Rtr. Lakshan had binged watched the entire season and some of us binged watched the entire series as well, by April 21st everyone was kind enough to submit their questions, so we can start picking up the best questions from each Season. This was the start of the post-midnight Zoom Calls that would go for a week every night.
Rtr. Lakshan here again, speaking of the midnight zoom calls, one of the striking factors for the success of this project was how every single member of our team somehow made time to be involved in every zoom call. Special shout out to our president, Rtr. Sathma Jayasinghe and for everyone else involved for never failing to miss even one of our zoom meetings despite their busy schedules and despite us dragging it on till around 3 am every night.
The process of making the quiz wasn’t a simple “make the questions” and “add the questions”. Our team went through each and every question at least 3 times and checked for errors and analyzed them for difficulty before finalizing the questions to be picked.
With all of that hard work of our team and with the fact that we were getting international registrations, we knew that this was going to be something of epic proportions.
The effort of our PR team cannot go unmentioned. The PR campaign was one of the best I have ever seen. From all the amazing videos to the eye-catching posters, everyone who saw would know how exceptionally brilliant it was.
Rtr. Theekshana and I always had the target of 150 registrations in mind. We thought it might be unrealistic even as this was about just one TV series so we were happy with getting about 100 registrations. With two days to go for the quiz, at the end of the 26th of April, we achieved the target of 100 participants. At the rate of registrations, we got per day, we didn’t really think we could hit the 150, we initially had in mind. Then on the 27th, our outstanding PR campaign hit an all-time high of 40 registrations in one day and gave us a shot at our target.
We were counting down to 150 on the last day and it was really fun to see how everyone including our President and Vice President was super excited and anxious for us to hit the 150 mark. With 3 hours to go, we finally got our 150th registration and we were over the moon!
Rtr. Theekshana again, speaking of registrations, hitting our target of 150 registrations was a real mood lifter for everyone involved; it was truly something magnificent. Until we hit 150 neither me nor Rtr. Lakshan believed that we would achieve it.
The final hour was upon us before the quiz began, with the registration closed at 4 pm we had 156 registrations in total. By 4.15 pm we started prepping for the quiz, by sending out the guidelines to everyone, one last time and we started another zoom call to make sure we go through everything simultaneously.
The time was upon us just 20 minutes to go, we started to share the quiz code on the WhatsApp groups, our quiz master/ moderator Rtr. Rahul shared his screen on the Zoom call so we, the organizers can watch the leaderboard. At first, we saw no one joining and we were shocked to see what was going on, but a simple refresh was in order to see who was waiting for the game to start, by 5.10 pm we started the 1st round of the first-ever Quarantine Heist.
For round 1 we had 50 questions with just 20 seconds for each question. We both had participated in these types of Quizzes in the past few weeks and one thing we noticed was that every quiz had a lot of complaints in the WhatsApp groups and we were dead scared that we would have similar reactions. 7 minutes into the quiz our phones buzzed with a message in the round 1 group. With a bit of a nervous feeling I opened the message just to see participants saying they were done, a few seconds later messages hit like a flash flood, everyone was happy and we were receiving a lot of positive feedback, it was really a special moment for everyone.
People were excited to compete in Round 2 and while we were tabulating the results, they were constantly asking as to when the results would be out as they were very excited to get to the final round. After making the relevant adjustments in the results by deducting points for taking more time than allocated, we finally got our top 50 sorted.
People were getting excited as the time passed, by 6.15 we were ready to start Round 2. And our 50 participants started doing the 30 questions in Round 2 which was also 20 seconds per question. The round 2 questions were hard because we wanted the most die-hard fans of the show to be the Finalists in the battle to be called the Ultimate Human/Genius. Round 2 was done in 10 minutes and it took a very short period of time to tabulate the results as no deductions were needed as people had not taken more than the allocated time to answer all the questions.
Now the most awaited round of them all the Finals were upon us. Rtr. Nadun was ready to live stream the entire final on our Club page on Facebook, Rtr. Vinuri and our President Rtr. Sathma was hosting the event, Rtr. Rahul aka the quizmaster was joined by our Vice President Rtr. Akila Kulathunge, ready to keep an eye on the final 10 if they were cheating and to calculate the points, Our Secretary Rtr Thisura was on buzzer duty and finally Rtr. Lakshan was in charge of showing the questions while I was incharge of managing the participants to ensure a smooth operation.
Once the welcomes and the rules were explained we started the finals with 20 questions and 3 tiebreakers. The finals went on great all participants knew most of the answers( we got the best of the best for the finals) and after about an hour we were done with the finals with Menasha Samaradiwakara deemed the Ultimate Human/Genius, with Heshan Wijayagunawardane and Pranavinth Sivananthan being the 1st and 2nd runner-ups respectively.
The feedback we got from participants and all the onlookers was astounding, it was some of the greatest feedback we got for a project we pulled off in just over a week’s time, a project that started with a simple idea over a simple group call among friends. Of course, all the credit can’t be only for us cause none of this would have been possible without the following people
Rtr. Sathma, for believing in us and for the late-night support even though she was super busy with work to make this a great successful project, and being the lab rat to test the questions.
Rtr. Thisura, even though he has never watched the show he came to late-night meetings and gave us ideas to make everything better.
Rtr. Nadun, for being the best video editor to start the PR and great leader who took the upper hand and guided us through every step of the way no matter what time it was, no matter how busy he was. We wouldn’t have pulled this off without him.
Rtr. Hiru, for some of the greatest posters for the epic PR campaign, he was asked a lot in a short period of time but he never said no and always exceeded our expectations.
Rtr. Akila K, for helping out with little details that made a bigger impact to make the project a success.
Rtr. Rahul, for introducing us to the Quizizz platform and giving us a complain less platform that everyone enjoyed to play in.
Rtr. Vinuri, for her amazing hosting skills along with Rtr. Sathma to make it a smooth final round.
Not to forget the question makers Rtr. Nadun, Rtr. Naadir, Rtr. Kasun, Rtr. Sandithi and Rtr. Akila K. Without these people we wouldn’t have had a great heist, we wouldn’t have to stay up late to select the best of the best. All we asked them for 15 questions from 1 season but they went above and beyond and gave us a whole lot more.
Thank you to everyone who participated, who helped us, who supported us, who contributed by even a little bit by sharing the quiz around family and friends to get us to our target of 150 registrations.
I’m Rtr. Theekshana Gunasekara with my Co-chairperson Rtr. Lakshan Banneheke thanking everyone involved and signing off.
Thank you and Stay Safe during these troublesome times.
Also if you are bummed out for missing the Quarantine Heist don’t worry, unlike other quizzes our quiz is here to stay. The links below are for you to try out Round 1 and Round 2. Feel free to enjoy some spectacular questions on Brooklyn Nine-Nine. NOINE-NOINE.
Round 1: http://quizizz.com/join?gc=354364
Round 2: http://quizizz.com/join?gc=780072
Rtr. Theekshana Gunasekara and Rtr. Lakshan Banneheke
Editor