Audio slide show: It’s game time!

By MIKE JAMES - The Independent

WURTLAND December 22, 2008 01:19 am

— A new game has captured Wurtland Middle School by storm.
It combines elements of the popular teen craze Dance Dance Revolution with the arcade staple Whack-a-Mole.
The game, with its four orange, light-studded towers, dominates the corner of the mezzanine in the gymnasium.
Each of the six-foot, vaguely surfboard-shaped towers has four large, evenly spaced buttons that light up in computer-generated patterns. Players set up the game from a central control console and spend the next few minutes jumping, stretching and slapping the lights as they blink on.
It’s called NEOS. And no one else in Kentucky has one.
Wurtland got the system thanks to a popular talk-show hostess and a teacher who was looking out for her students even after she thought she was losing her job.
Outside of Wurtland, devotees of daytime TV may be the only people in these parts familiar with the game.
It’s been a regular feature on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, where a Wurtland English teacher won the $40,000 system for the school last May.
Jana Lovins entered a contest in April, about the time she heard that revenue shortfalls were threatening staff cuts and the loss of Wurtland’s physical education program. She wrote as persuasively as she could to the show’s producers, citing her school’s fiscal predicament and Kentucky’s abysmal health statistics as justification for awarding the system to Wurtland.
If she’d wanted to wring a little pity out of them, she could have included another salient fact: her job was one of those on the chopping block.
Producers called her in May and asked for more information about the school and students. A couple of days later they told her she was a finalist and flew her to California the next day.
Once there, Lovins got the whole limo and private dressing room VIP treatment. Show officials told her she was among a pool of finalists and that the two most outgoing and energetic ones would go onstage and play the game. The winner would take it home.
“I was hamming it up because I wanted to get picked,” she said. “I wasn’t going to fly out to California and lose. I didn’t want to let the kids down.”
Sitting in the audience, Lovins heard her name and bounced down to the stage, where she hugged DeGeneres and her rival teacher.
She found out later there were only two finalists. The other phantom contestants were a ruse to make sure she and her rival were energized.
A fan of the show, Lovins had seen others play the game but had never tried it herself. After she won the match, DeGeneres gave game systems to both schools.
Lovins flew home that night elated that she’d won but still believing she was jobless. It wasn’t until two weeks before school started that she learned the district had come up with enough money to preserve her position.
The system was installed in September and Lovins was the first to play on it. Since then she has set the standard for competition: “I’m still undefeated,” she said.
MIKE JAMES can be reached at mjames@dailyindependent.com or at (606) 326-2652.

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