The smartest grade schoolers in the world are about to take over ESPN.

Today marks the beginning of the 86th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. Preliminaries for the Scripps National Spelling Bee began at 8 a.m. this morning and run until 5:30 p.m this evening. This year’s Bee features 281 children between the ages of 8 and 14, all of whom are vying to advance to the final round, which airs live from The Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Maryland on ESPN tomorrow night at 8 p.m.

For the first time in the Bee’s history, a vocabulary section was incorporated in the qualifier. According to the Scripps press release, each contestant’s bid to the 2013 semifinals and finals include three components: onstage spelling (happening live today), computer-generated spelling questions, and computer-generated vocabulary questions. Not only is this the first time vocabulary has been included in the Bee, but it also now counts for a whopping 50% of the contestant’s overall preliminary score.

Additionally, a time limit of 45 minutes – another first for the Bee – will be implemented for this electronically-administered test in the Preliminaries.Sounds like a pretty tall order for kids who were taught to rely on phonetics.

Director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee Paige Kimble firmly supports this new form of evaluation:

“Spelling and vocabulary are, in essence, two sides of the same coin,” said Kimble. “As a child studies the spelling of a word and its etymology, he will discover its meaning. As a child learns the meaning of a word, it becomes easier to spell. And all of this enhances the child’s knowledge of the English language.”

But the challenges for this year’s contestants don’t stop there. Numerous other changes have been made to the official rules, making the competition more cutthroat than ever before.

• Any misspellings in Round Two or Round Three of the Preliminaries will result in immediate elimination from the competition. In previous years, misspellings in these early rounds did not qualify a contestant to be dismissed.
• Another computer generated test will be included in the semi-finals (to be administered tomorrow), where before it was used only to determine who advanced from the preliminary round.
• Only 12 spellers will be named Championship Finalists at the end of Round Six of the semi-finals. In past years, there has been neither a limit on the number of contestants to advance to the final round, nor a limited number of rounds to determine their advancement.

The pool of contestants features some extraordinarily talented kiddos, to say the least. The youngest speller in the bunch, Tara Singh, is just eight years old. 116 of the contestants speak multiple languages. Overall, math is cited as their favorite subject. Yes, they really are that well rounded.

Oh, and not only can they spell “perestroika,” one of the first words selected for today’s prelims, but now they can also tell you what it means.

Think you would make the cut? Take the Scripps Preliminaries Test here.