How residents stayed connected during COVID
We are delighted to share this wonderful story collaborated by Graeme Cooper, Lynne Bailey and Lyn Davies of Living Choice Broadwater Court:
Agility and Flexibility – Thanks COVID-19
Collaborated by Graeme Cooper, Lynne Bailey and Lyn Davies
Agile and flexible, two key concepts from the digital world describe our Guess and Gossip SMH quiz group at Broadwater Court Waterfront Estate. We have transformed our long-established Saturday morning group meetings filled with laughter and fun onto a Zoom platform and enjoy these with probably more frivolity and fun as we master the challenges technology sets us.
Experiencing this enjoyable, social interaction is an important aspect of life that we didn’t want taken away from us during Lockdown.
Neighbours and other nearby residents at the Waterfront Estate have continued to socialise (via Zoom), despite the restrictions of the Covid 19 lockdown, by working their way through the Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend Quiz. It has enabled us to continue this wonderful social interaction.
For a few hours each Saturday, our “brains trust” of people log on, some more easily than others, and those challenged by Zoom are always helped by a willing neighbour or even a Living Choice representative. We work our way through each quiz question under the guidance of Quizmaster Graeme. After much friendly banter and discussion along the way, we finally arrive at what the majority consider to be the correct answer. Everyone is free to have their own opinion about the correct answer and very frequently do! We avoid having multiple answers in the spirit of gamesmanship. The dissenters can claim an extra point at the end if they are correct but it doesn’t improve our overall score, which varies from a bit tragic to pretty outstanding if we say so ourselves!
The cryptic “Get It” photo puzzle is always discussed first and is a good icebreaker to get things started, and it also allows for the later comers, the coffee getters and the Zoom strugglers to be supported.
No Googling or cheating is allowed because the often humorous, attempted intuitive, and “I don’t have a clue”, discussion about the possible answer to the questions is more important than ensuring we have the correct answer. As a group we are quite diverse and so our varied and combined knowledge ensures our debate, and our suggested answers, are as much fun as finding the correct answer. Our goal is to try and improve on previous results but perhaps the larger goal is about community, friendship, support and having a really good laugh. We ensure that after completing the quiz we have an opportunity to discuss how everyone is going and what they have been up to.
Zoom can be easily set up and it’s simply a matter of finding someone with the necessary experience to organise each meeting. At Broadwater Court we were so fortunate to have Lyn Davies as part of our group, and her experience with Zoom made our meetings possible. In addition, the Living Choice office staff happily assisted those residents who lacked experience using Zoom.
As we gradually come out of lockdown and restrictions eased, our Saturday Quiz group will shift from Zoom to face to face, and will continue as we did pre-Covid. This means that at 11:00AM you will find us all sitting out the front of one of the participants’ villas with our coffee, biscuits, scones and other goodies. There is also a suggestion that in future we have a monthly BBQ after the quiz fun and games have finished.
The Saturday Quiz has been a wonderful catalyst for us to get together and have a really good time and we are very happy to share our experience with anyone interested in setting up their own group.