As with every new school year, there are new student participants in various extracurricular activities. An important factor in being able to be an active and participating member of extracurricular activities such as FFA, Ag-Academy, and Debate is being able to learn the ropes of the activity, one way the aforementioned groups do this is by attending the Kansas State Fair.

On Monday Sept. 9, Ag-Academy and members of the NHS FFA club attended the fair. Following that, the Debate team attended on Tuesday, Sep. 10. This has been a running tradition for these activities.

“So FFA is all about agricultural type things, the state fair is a good place to experience a lot of those things… ,” junior Ag-Academy member Keaton Benedick said, “We had a purpose to go and learn about new things, and I would say we accomplished that goal of learning.”

Participants of these clubs and teams attended the state fair with the intentions of learning and gaining some experience in their respective activity, freshman novice debater Diana Hatch believes she was successful in doing so.

“The debate team watched a series of practice debates, and took notes on them,” Hatch said. “[The other novice debaters and I] kind of saw like how debate works like further than just like explaining it in class, which was very useful.”

Although all three of these activities attended the fair with a common goal of learning, that process does not look the same for each team.

“We tried to teach a lot about how to take notes because you have to take a certain style of notes in debate and just kind of what it looks like to do debate,” junior debater Miguel Molina Chavez said. “It just was to show what real debate looks like in the high school environment. So it was mainly just a learning experience for the novice debaters.”

Additionally, FFA and the Ag-Academy had an opportunity to learn some of the proper terminology used in the agriculture industry.

“We were given a scavenger hunt where we had to go find, certain types of things like all the farm equipment, the butter, sculptures, everything like that,” Benedick said. “It depends on kind of how much you know about, you know, your act type stuff, you can learn so much from the scavenger hunt.”

For the remainder of the time that the extracurricular participants were not taking part in activities that pertain to learning, they wandered around the state fair, seeing all the festivities and food options that were offered.