This year, the Ames radio station 88.5 KURE, which is student produced and managed, celebrated its 50th Kaleidoquiz by sending students on random adventures across campus.

Kaleidoquiz has been providing Iowa Staters with activities and trivia questions for 50 years now. It is a radio contest that streams and broadcasts for 26 hours, starting at 4 p.m. Friday and ending at 6 p.m. Saturday. 

The adventures students participated included drag races, picture and video submissions, socializing events and more. Meanwhile, other members of their teams tuned in to 88.5 FM to answer questions every six minutes. The number of questions came to a total of 228. 

Fifteen teams participated in this year’s Kaleidoquiz. They earned points by completing montages, answering trivia and going on scavenger hunts. Members were sent out to different campus locations such as Parks Library, Carver Hall and the Black Engineering Building to compete in all manners of crazy events.

This year’s winner was the team 2Pac and a Council of Bears, which took the title with 11,047 points. The group, which was composed of 35 members, also won the Best Travel Team award. 

John Papineau, who was one of two team leaders for 2pac and a Council of Bears, credited a group of three who went out and scored them 1,975 points for the long distance travel challenge. The team also credited its success to checking the KURE website for tips on how to win.

“We had a lot of people who all contributed a lot and we made up a ton of ground on the travel quiz,” Papineau said.

The original Kaleidoquiz was much different from what Iowa State students played over the weekend. 

Craig Spear was an English major who volunteered in 1967 at KURE, which was previously named KISU. During the time, other college radio stations had been broadcasting trivia questions and receiving positive feedback. Spear was interested and decided that he wanted to bring it to the Iowa State campus.

Working on a name that would set KISU’s contest apart, they chose Kaleidoquiz to stick out to listeners. The contest was 42 hours long and started slow, with no call-ins for the first question and one caller for the second, Spear said.

Then at noon, calls began to pour in. In that first day, 35,000 calls were placed. Due to the amount of calls going to KISU, no one was able to make calls on campus, and KISU ran into some trouble with phone companies. Ultimately, they decided to keep Kaleidoquiz running, and it has turned into one of the largest radio trivia games across college campuses.