How To Run A Virtual Quiz

So you think a quiz might be fun over a video meeting service? Here’s some tips to help it go well

Until other services catch up to the combination of performance and host capabilities that it offers, Zoom is the clear leader for hosting online quizzes. Pay (currently) £11.99 a month for a Pro licence to remove the 40 minute time limit on meetings and then in the days leading up to the quiz, get everyone to install Zoom on their devices and test it out. You don’t want to be dealing with user technical issues during the event. Don’t be afraid to be trigger happy on the Mute All button (disabling the option for people to unmute themselves) otherwise your instructions will get lost in the mire.

While MS Office Forms are in some ways better, its features don’t help here. Google Forms allows you to quickly and easily create answer sheets either tailored specifically to each round, or a single answer sheet that can be reused for every round. I favour the latter because it means participants only need one link for answers. A standard form with Team Name (top tip: gather all team names beforehand and make this a drop down list so inevitable spelling mistakes etc don’t mess up your results spreadsheet), Round Number as a drop down list, and then 20 free form text fields as Question 1, Question 2, etc is perfect. Make sure you enable the form option for ‘Show link to submit another response’ if using the same blank answer form for each round.

I see a lot of people hosting online quizzes telling people to use a laptop only and switch between the quiz and answers — this isn’t ideal. Instead, tell everyone to get 2 devices ready, use the best/largest screen for the Zoom meeting and use the other device to type answers into the Google form. Share the link to the Zoom meeting and the Google form days before the quiz and ensure everyone has them ready on both devices.

If people are sat at home they’re going to Google the answers, especially on spoken question rounds. There’s not much you can do about this other than get creative with other rounds where the answers can’t be Googled. For example I did 2 spoken rounds and 4 multimedia rounds. The use of Zoom with its brilliant multimedia streaming performance allows you to do music rounds, movie rounds, geography rounds etc. I’ll link to some of the rounds I did at the end of this piece.

I did a ‘What’s The Missing Phrase?’ movie round where a clip plays, then the audio drops out as the character says a (usually famous) phrase, such as “I’ll be back” from Terminator, or “Make my day” from Dirty Harry. To do this I used my trusty old install of Pinnacle Studio 17 to capture the screen while streaming from Netflix, Prime, etc and then edit inside Pinnacle Studio. In the application I was able to split the audio out and use volume keyframing to drop out at the precise point the phrase is spoken. Much easier to do than it sounds. A good 20 or 30 seconds leading up in each clip is advisable so you can overlay the question number as a title at the start of each clip.

For a music round I picked 3 famous songs from each decade starting in the 60s. I then recorded 10 seconds of each song using Audacity set to record computer audio and streamed the songs using Google Play Music (you can use Spotify, iTunes, local MP3s, etc) leaving a 10 second gap so I could speak out the question number during the quiz. I selected the entire audio and applied a reverse effect to it. The resulting audio was perfectly challenging — still recognisable to an extent but tricky enough to be difficult. Ensure you select the Zoom options to optimise for video streaming when playing audio / video and leave it off for picture rounds so the still image is clearer.

You can use Powerpoint if you have it and you’re good at it but Slides is fine for a quiz. I used this for a round of guessing where you are in the world using Streetview pictures with little clues present and a round of ‘edited’ celebrity faces to guess the celeb. To edit the celeb faces I used Photoshop (a student creative cloud licence is £15 / month) and the Liquify effect.

Finally, when marking answers, using the Google Forms spreadsheet export, get it into Excel if you have it and use Pivot Tables after cleaning up the data a bit (unless you hard code the team names into the form as a dropdown, as suggested above). If you’re talented you could set bits of the correct answers as cell lookups to mark the answers for you or you can just do it all manually.

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