Sielle St-André knows what she knows, and what she knows earned her the title of a Pop Whiz Champion for Ottawa.
The 13-year-old Plantagenet girl took on all comers and won with the most points and the correct answers when they counted in the Pop Whiz Challenge on the GameTV satellite network. She earned the title of Pop Whiz Champion for the Ottawa region and also $750.
“I couldn’t believe I had just won,” said Sielle, during a Sunday morning interview with her and her parents, Stéphane and Christina.
Sielle is a pretty typical Canadian who likes her family and friends and cheers for Montréal when she watches hockey hilites on T.V.
“At school, people keep talking about the Habs, so I started watching them on T.V.,” she said. “Now they’re my favourite team.”
Sielle also started watching Pop Whiz when it appeared on Canada’s GameTV satellite network. The show features teenage contestants and the overall focus is on popular culture. Episodes feature contestants on a rotating basis from Canada’s major cities and surrounding areas. Sielle saw a casting notice ad for possible competitors in Ottawa and the surrounding area for one of the Season Five episodes and decided to put her name in.
She filed her entry application in autumn 2024. An email acceptance arrived around the end of that year.
“I was really happy,” she said, adding that she had some doubts about her chances of getting accepted. “I thought there were others who know more trivia than I did.”
The Pop Whiz episode Sielle qualified for was shot in Kanata last April. For Sielle and the other contestants, it was a five-hour day of answering questions about popular culture like movies, T.V. episodes, and other topics, interspersed with one-on-one interviews with the show’s hosts. During the quiz sessions, Sielle followed her strategy of making sure she answered every question, even if she wasn’t sure the answer was right. Not answering a question earned contestants a three-point penalty on their Pop Whiz scores.
Not all the questions, though, were about popular culture. A few were about more general, including one question that stumped all the other young contestants, but not Sielle. The question was: What is a baby deer called?
She was the only question to give “fawn” as the correct answer. That, and a string of other correct answers, gave Sielle enough points to get her through both the opening round and the semi-final round and into the finals round between her and one other contestant, with Sielle finishing as Pop Whiz Champion of Ottawa for that episode.
Her parents aren’t surprised. Stéphane, a bio-medical engineer, and Christine, a Canada Post analyst, both know how smart their daughter is.
“She knew her alphabet at two years old,” said Stéphane. “She couldn’t say it yet, but she could point it (letters) out. She has a really good memory.”
At École secondaire catholique de Plantagenet, Sielle’s favourite subject is geography.
“I like to learn about the world and the state it’s in,” she said.
Outside of her school work, Sielle enjoys reading young adult horror novels in the Goosebumps series and other books, playing softball and volleyball in the summer. She got a volleyball rebounder kit for Christmas which will let her practice her volleyball techniques indoors.
She also loves to dance.
“I actually dance competitively,” she said, explaining that she is a member of the ExtraDanse Academy in Rockland.
“My mum signed me up because I had too much energy in the house,” Sielle said, smiling, as her mother nods, also smiling.
Her favourite dance style is hip-hop.
“It’s fast,” she said, “and I find that other dance styles have a lot of (specific) techniques.”
Now that she is a Pop Whiz Champion, Sielle is getting back into her routines at home and school. Her goal some day is to become a marine biologist.
“In the summer I always watch Shark Week,” she said, smiling, referring to the popular National Geographic T.V. series.
But her main interest as a future marine biologist is the sea turtle. She is fascinated by a creature that faces and overcomes adversity almost from the day it is born as baby sea turtles have to crawl as fast as they can from their hatching area to get into the safety of the sea before gulls or other birds can snatch them up for a meal.
If the people behind the Pop Whiz series ever decide to do a Champion of Champions episode or series, Sielle would be interested in taking part. She likes the idea of facing off against other Ottawa area Pop Whiz champions and also the winners of the game show from other Canadian cities.
“I think I’d do pretty well,” she said, smiling. “I know a lot of things other people done’t know.”
