New generation quiz types

There are some new generation quiz creation websites that are adding an extra dimension of fun and feedback for both students and teachers.

While each has their own special take on this quiz genre, the main features are:

• immediate feedback about the whether  answer is right or wrong
• the questions are primarily multiple choice – with large squares to choose from
• there is a leader board of all contestants
• the results are kept for the teacher to analyse after the quiz is ended.

The feedback in terms of a leader board so that all the class can see themselves compared to others, plus the points depending of the speed of response, are what elevates this genre from the old Hot Potatoes, StudyMate, Respondus, Wondershare quiz style.

Kahoot! (at about the end of 2014) was the first of these quiz types. It featured a way for a teacher to control the game whereby everyone gets a question at the same time and the points they got for getting it right depended on the speed they answered (I called this type of scoring “poinutes” when I designed a game for an app in 2012). So rather than see the best students all equal on the same points, which is a bit boring, they would be split by the speed of response. This can build up anticipation as the students await the scores on the leader board after answering each question. I imagine it can set up quite a tension towards the end of a quiz as there is guaranteed to be winner.

Step 1 – the teacher sets up the quiz and displays a code on the teacher’s whiteboard or smartboard.

Kahoot set up by teacher

Step 2

The students go to kahoot.it (which is a bit confusing when you do it the first time as it is a different url from the teacher’s) and use the code to enter the game.

Students enter the game

This is what is displayed on the board.

This is the teacher’s view.

This is what the students see on their desktop, laptop or mobile device.

Student view

Here you can see the scoreboard – only me at the moment!

The leader board

It is designed as a whole class activity and does it very well. All the questions are multiple choice types – up to four per question. These are displayed on the whiteboard of the class while the student screens only display up to four coloured squares for the students to choose from. This forces all students to pay attention to the whiteboard. To add a bit of a twist to playing the game a second time, there is a “Ghost” mode. This displays the players’ current score and their previous score at the same stage of the quiz. Students can then get some fun from playing against themselves even if they can’t match other students – some clever motivational psychology at work.

The main downside is that the quiz can only be used in class – it can’t be set for homework or as a reward for students finishing early. Also, the responses are just clicking – no active typing required. A caution about selecting this quiz type is that it will take quite a long time to create it, compared to Quizlet, for example. You have to make up all the vocabulary and distractors yourself. You can certainly copy those distractors once you have created them, but even creating just a 10 question quiz would result in the teacher copying 50 words and definitions.