The contestants don’t have to answer in the form of a question, and there aren’t any Daily Doubles or thousands of dollars to be won, but that’s where most of the differences end.

In Granite State Challenge, host Jon Cannon does his best Alex Trebek impersonation, and high school students from all across New Hampshire do their best to channel their inner Ken Jennings — or for younger Jeopardy! fans, James Holzhauer or Amy Schneider.

It’s the annual trivia competition between New Hampshire high schools that began in 1984 and airs on New Hampshire PBS. Hopkinton High School once again has a group of students in the tournament after reaching the semifinals last season, and its first round episode against Salem High School airs on Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

Hopkinton’s team features senior captain Adam Richter, senior Colton Murphy, junior Flo Dapice, senior Jackson Kovar, senior Conrad Mollano and sophomores Fin Murphy and Thomas Ashton. Most of the group was on last year’s team that came two wins shy of taking home the championship trophy.

This year, they welcomed a new coach, Hopkinton High social studies teacher Liam Callahan, who admitted he’s not the biggest trivia nerd himself, but saw it as a great way to get involved in the school community after starting there in the fall. He had some of the students in class, and they ultimately convinced him to take over the role.

In the months leading up to the tournament — NH PBS taped the episodes in January — Callahan would spend hours with the students reading through trivia questions from old Granite State Challenges. They’d memorize U.S. presidents in order, pour through random tidbits about New Hampshire and brush up on Shakespeare which, Callahan admits, is a major weakness of his but something the students excel at.

 “I’m a social studies teacher; I’m not a big English guy,” he joked. “There would be some obscure, ‘This character in this Shakespeare play,’ and one of them would pull it out.”

However, there are also some instances where Callahan finds himself baffled — in an amused way, of course — at some of the questions the students come up empty on. Growing up in the early 2000s and with parents who grew up in the ‘70s, he said, he’s well-versed in pop culture from those eras, but it sometimes poses a challenge for the students.

“There are things that I know about music, about pop culture from 15, 20 years ago that aren’t common knowledge anymore,” he said. “That’s always kind of funny to see the questions that they knew that I had no idea just because they’d been studying versus the questions I know just because they’re too young to know.”

Joining the students on stage at the NH PBS studio will be someone else of note from the Concord area: Cannon, the host, who’s also a social studies teacher at Bow High School.

He took over hosting duties after Jim Jeannotte retired in 2018. He’d previously been involved with Granite State Challenge as a student at Belmont High School, then behind the scenes working in production as a college student at the University of New Hampshire and as a coach for the Bedford High School team. Mixed in there, he also worked on Jeopardy! for nearly four years as a member of the clue crew.

It was that time spent at Jeopardy! in the late 2000s when he had the chance to learn game show hosting by osmosis from Trebek, who hosted Jeopardy! for 37 seasons until his death in 2020.

“He almost never messed up,” Cannon said. “He was just on point all the time.”

While the stakes on Granite State Challenge aren’t quite as high, Cannon understands how meaningful it is for the participating students, particularly as an avenue for competition for non-athletes.

“We are always singing the praises of our student-athletes who put on their uniform and go and compete out on the court or the field or on the trails or in the pool for their school, and what a wonderful opportunity it is for those young men and women,” he said. “Granite State Challenge is the premier tournament for kids who are bright and knowledgeable to compete on behalf of their school. … (It) hits a certain type of kid who is good at (trivia) and wants to shine and gives them that opportunity to represent themselves and their schools.”

For Callahan, it’s also a great tool for helping the students learn information that’s probably handy to know anyway.

“It’s fun, and it allows them to compete against other schools and just boost their knowledge of political history and those sorts of things, which as a social studies teacher, I think are important,” the Hopkinton coach said. “There’s some, by nature, trivial stuff. But I do think a lot of the questions they ask are important things for well-informed people to know. I think that aspect of it is really beneficial.”

Both Callahan and Cannon already know the result of Thursday night’s match, but for obvious reasons, neither could say much about how Hopkinton performed.

As the host, Cannon can’t take a rooting interest — aside from rooting for “a good barn burner of a game,” as he put it — but he can take appreciation in seeing some familiar faces from Hopkinton who’ve experienced a good deal of success in the tournament in recent years.

“That’s always really cool as well, to see kids come back year after year and get better,” Cannon said. “Hopkinton has been a strong team basically the whole time they’ve been on the show. … And it is always fun to see their hard work pay off.”