How To Make Quizzes Educational

We offer many quizzes at this online store, both themed (e.g. about Christmas) and educational (e.g. about Shapes or Colors). I’ve written some articles before about our general process and philosophy behind the themed quizzes, such as Our Quiz Philosophy.

This time I wanted to look at how to make a (pub) quiz, or a general “trivia experience”, more educational. How to make it function within a classroom setting, or any setting where the main purpose is to let kids have fun while learning about a topic.

This article will also include some tips and tricks if you intend to use the quizzes educationally. We wove them into this article because you really need to know the context, the full why behind the tip, to understand it.

Wait, aren’t all quizzes educational?

Well, yes, a quiz is basically a test. And we all know that our systems of education love their tests. It’s a sequence of questions that you have to answer, and the more of them you answer correctly, the better your score.

But testing is different from teaching.

Checking if you happen to know the answer to something is different from learning.

When we create a quiz about a specific topic—say, music—the joy is mostly in knowing the answer. In reading a question and realizing you have this knowledge. In finding the perfect answer, perhaps after racking your brain for a few seconds. It makes you feel proud of yourself, it makes you feel smart. You are not, however, actively puzzling or learning new information. It’s either “you know the answer or you don’t”.

When we create a quiz for educational purposes, this obviously won’t work. It’s not supposed to be a basic test. You don’t learn anything from “oh, I don’t know the answer to this, too bad, moving on”.

Sure, you go through the correct answers at the end. But, in my vast experience hosting these quizzes, this is not a great learning moment either.

• Checking the answers is the last ~5% of the quiz. Having 95% of it not be educational is not great.
• Most people just check if they are right or wrong, then give points accordingly. There’s no further thought, or discussion, or debate.
• As such, most people impatiently blast through the answers because they want to finish the quiz and know who won. Barely any of that information will actually stick around in their memory.

As such, I realized I needed to structure the quiz itself in a smarter way.

Trick #1: Bigger Answer Reveals

Our quiz system has the ability to look at the answer immediately. (By pressing A, you toggle between question and answer.) It had this ability from the start. You can always check answers in the moment, instead of at the end, which already makes it more educational.

But it’s not satisfying to just dump the right answer, and that’s that.

We always do our best to explain WHY this is the right answer. Giving fun facts, extra interesting tidbits, and more.

Of course, you can easily overwhelm or bore people with this. It has to remain a quiz, not a textbook. As such, these extra comments are usually only a single paragraph with a few sentences at most.

Instead, an even stronger way to give extra information, is through the media attached to the question. Our quiz system has the ability to say “only display this image/video/audio on ANSWER MODE, not question mode”. It didn’t have this from the start, but it was surely one of the first things we added later ;)

The correct answer for most questions can be shown or experienced. Which is much stronger than just giving a one-word correct written answer.

Whenever possible, we use media (that only appears on answer mode) to support this answer.

For a simple example, imagine a question about photosynthesis. When asking the question, there is no image. (Either to not overwhelm players or to not give away too much of the answer.) But when the answer is revealed, an image is also present that SHOWS the diagram/drawing/schematic for what we’re talking about.

And so …

Tip #1 for classrooms: Check answers to questions immediately, not at the end. Focus most of your time on the answers, instead of the questions. It’s more important to explain WHY an answer is correct, in detail, than to painstakingly wait until everyone has finally written something down.

Trick #2: Connections & Associations

The second power of quizzes are that they can have rounds, or themes, or connected questions.

Humans learn through association. By attaching some new information to old information we already know. As such, to maximize learning from a quiz, it should …

• Contain 1/2 to 2/3 questions to which you know the answer. (Or, at least, that you can figure out or answer correctly somehow.)
• And contain 1/2 to 1/3 questions to which you don’t know the answer. These new bits of information can now be stored in your memory by connecting them to the things you did know. Because they’re all part of the same quiz experience, right next to one another.

As such,

Whenever possible, we group questions into connected rounds, and we make the same thing reappear in different ways throughout the quiz.

An educational quiz should not only have really hard questions that only the clevers of kids can know. It should have a mix of easy and hard questions, because the easy ones make the hard ones possible. But this only works if they’re connected. If they’re about the same topic, or asked in a similar way, or maybe even directly reference each other.

In fact, if you read my other articles, you know that we often purposely hide the right answer to a question somewhere else in the quiz. Those who paid attention can realize “wait, question 10 was about the same thing and mentioned that word, might it be the answer here?” That’s not cheating or making it too easy. That’s making it fun and educational. People feel great when they realize this. People feel better knowing most answers than staring at a blank page and shrugging.

As such, we believe an educational quiz should always be focused (but not too focused). All the questions should clearly be connected to each other. If we have a bunch of questions that we just can’t place anywhere—they don’t seem to belong anywhere, they can’t be their own group, they feel a bit different—we’re likely to discard them. Or move them to some other quiz that’s more focused on that specific topic.

For example, our quiz about “Grouping” (the skill of identifying things as being in the same group or not) focuses on that and nothing else. There are no “general knowledge” questions, like, I don’t know “where does the word GROUP come from?” or “how large are typical packs of wolves?”. It has focused questions on identifying whether things are the same group or not, that’s that. Even “Connections”-style puzzles, where you have to divide a bunch of concepts into logical subgroups, are their own quiz (Quiz of Connections: Kids) as opposed to tacking it on here.

Themed quizzes thrive on more variety. (To have a large target audience, to prevent anyone getting bored, to really look at the theme in fun and diverse ways.) Educational quizzes thrive on a focused set of connected questions, some purposely easy, and others purposely hard (a “teaching question”).

Tip #2 for classrooms: at least try to do one round in one session, so all these connected questions are fresh in the player’s minds. Doing the entire quiz in one go is even better, but not always feasible. Then, whenever possible, remind them of earlier questions or connected questions elsewhere in the quiz. Don’t be shy about giving hints and clues this way: the associations to things the kids do understand are crucial to the learning process.

Trick #3: Give The Answers, But Mixed Up

Okay, we started with a trick for the whole quiz, and one for rounds of connected questions. Let’s go one step “smaller” and focus on a handful of individual questions. When I just started designing educational quizzes, I learned a trick for maximizing the “learning” part, but it does require a set of questions (usually 3 to 5 of them).

How does it work?

• You make the questions multiple choice.
• Each question has the same possible answers.
• It’s just that a different one is true for each question.

For example,

• Question = “What do you get when you mix red and blue?”; Answers = Purple / Green / Orange
• Question = “What do you get when you mix blue and yellow”; Answers = Purple / Green / Orange
• Question = “What do you get when you mix yellow and red?”; Answers = Purple / Green / Orange

This allows you to give all the answers (terms / words / concepts) you want people to know and learn. But you still get several connected questions out of it that aren’t “obvious”. They’re still questions that you have to think about.

Additionally, you have now given the players a way to “figure out” the right answer. They can now “puzzle” a bit, instead of the quiz merely being a series of “you know it or you don’t”-questions. Because if they already picked a certain answer for the previous question, they can’t pick it again now. (Which is what the next trick is about.)

It’s the best!

Of course, it’s boring to do this for an entire quiz. Luckily, you can change the approach a little bit.

• You can do it with images. Have the questions and possible answers be the same, it’s just that the image (or media) attached is different.
• You can do it with numbers or letters. For example, you say “every question in this round has a DIFFERENT number for the answer”. Then the round can have 10 open questions, but this single gimmick connects them all and helps players consider valid answers. (“Oh, we already used the 3 on that one, and I’m pretty sure about that, so this one can’t be 3—what else can it be?”)
• You can do it with anagrams. This is great for unlocking “latent knowledge”. When people have a vague memory of something, maybe heard a word once or twice in their life, they won’t recall it when it’s an open question. But if you give the right answer, but scrambled (or a blurred picture), it puts them on the right track and helps them out.
• You can spread out these questions. This basically creates a repeating pattern throughout the whole quiz, regularly reminding people of a certain concept or term. By the end, they’ll have seen this thing ten times (but spaced out at irregular intervals), which is great for learning.
• I’m sure we’ll find more creative ways to do this same trick in the future :)

Tip #3 for classrooms: as stated before, merely “testing” is not “learning”. You want to give all the answers. You want to help people learn certain words or ideas in the first place, don’t be shy about it. This is the only way they can actually get those questions correct later, because they realize something they saw before is the answer here. Which brings me to …

Trick #4: Turn Questions into Puzzles

Now let’s take a final step and look at an even smaller part of the quiz: individual questions.

This is the biggest challenge when making quizzes: “How do I craft a question that’s challenging, but not too challenging?” How do I craft this question such that it’s not impossible to answer, but finding the right answer still takes some effort? Such that it’s not a “you know it or you don’t” situation, but a puzzle that you can work through and, most of all, learn through?

There is no perfect formula for this, of course. It depends on the information. It depends on what the players will generally already understand and what they’ll struggle with. And, seeing as we don’t have access to all kids in the world and can’t test our quizzes infinitely many times, this is mostly an educated guess about the “right average difficulty”.

But, as expected, we’ve learned some tricks.

• The actual question and answer should be absolutely as short and simple as possible. The difficulty in a test should not come from vaguely worded questions or impossibly contrived answers. Any other information or clarification can be moved to separate sentences or comments, not part of one long convoluted main question.
• Any information that’s “you know it or you don’t” is given. It can be hinted. It can be shown in the attached image. It can be a small comment or clarification. In any case, any information we consider impossible to “figure out” during this quiz, and unlikely to be common knowledge, is just given in the question.
  • This is the learning part. This is how the players actually see words and concepts for the first time. Where their first introduction to a bit of knowledge starts. It has to be shown, or experienced, or told at least once first.
  • For a mediocre example, you can probably ask adults to “Name an insect.” But with kids, you might want to say “Insects have six legs and a hard skin. Can you name one?”
  • Or, adults can be asked “Ramses II was a pharao (Yes/No)”. For an educational quiz, it’s better to say “Pharaos were Egyptian kings. Was Ramses II one of them?” Even better would be to move “In Egypt, what was a pharao?” to an earlier question.
• With that information out of the way, we’re left with the “information leap”. The one bit of information players need to figure out or recall to answer this question. Hints and clues towards this part can be hidden in the question itself. These hints can give away the 100% full answer, but it’s better if they are, well, merely a hint.

Here are some “hint options” we’ve often used in the past.

• Attach media (image/audio/video). For example, I might ask “What does Mesopotamia mean?” and include a map of the area, where Mesopotamia is clearly marked between two big rivers (Tigris & Euphratis). Clever players can look at that, think for a bit, and deduce that it means between two rivers.
• Be smart about how you give multiple choice answers. For example, we might ask about the man who invented something. If half the answers have a female name, players can rule them out. (As we all know from “exam training” at school … 99% of answering a multiple choice question correctly is just eliminating the obvious wrong answers.) Furthermore, maybe one of the two remaining options is some other guy that you believe was already the answer to a previous question. Ta da, you put in some effort, and got it right as a reward. Which is the core of having fun + learning.
• Provide an “anagram” of the right answer, as explained at the previous trick.
• Show a picture of the actual answer, but blurred or “modified” with some weird filter to obfuscate it a bit.
• Depending on your target audience, you might get away with some “busy work”. Like asking players to first calculate something instead of giving that number outright. Or maybe turning the quiz into a more custom experience and hiding physical clues around the room that they can find.
• Ask the question in a “weird way”. Say, an odd grammatical structure or word choice. This feels “off” to many players, and they’ll try to figure out why, and it might help them to the right answers.
  • For example, we might ask “Which Harry Potter spell turns your victim into a cadaver?” The phrase turn into a cadaver is an odd way to say kill. But it hints to the right answer: Avada Kedavra.
  • We LOVE this, and so do players, but it’s obviously very hard and time-consuming to come up with such riddles all the time. So we probably don’t use it nearly as often as we should.

In a way, educational quizzes build a map of knowledge over time. At the first question, assume the player barely knows anything. Then give information, and more information, and more associated topics, until, at the final questions, you can assume they know a lot and can figure out some really tough questions. Any information that’s too hard, or probably unknown, should literally be given. The leap from “things I know” to “thing I don’t know ( = answer to question)” can be bridged with subtle hints and clues.

Tip #4 for classrooms: notice when our quizzes use such tricks. Help your players realize the hints and clues. Also notice when your players are just completely stumped by a question because of “you know it or you don’t” information. If needed, give them this exact information to help them. Learning happens in that quick leap from “oh, because I know THIS and THIS, I know the answer must be THAT”. Don’t be shy about giving people the this and this, and leading them to that.

In this vein, we’ve invented something for our educational quizzes that we still have to give a proper name. It’s something like “Multi-step Questions” or “Building Rounds”. The idea is simple,

• Every question in the round is small and focused on a new bit of information players should learn.
• You check and discuss the answer after each question.
• The first few questions are very simple and self-contained. (Ex: “Is a tree an animal or a plant?”)
• Later questions reuse the info/answers from previous questions more and more. (Ex: “Look at the images. Are they all plants?”)
• So that … as you continue the round … you’re building up this knowledge base about a certain topic. Each question gives that next bit of information. Each question builds on the previous.
• Until the final question of the round is a big, challenging question that requires multiple thinking steps to answer. But that’s no issue, because we prepared you for it ;) (Ex: “Split the images into two groups: animals and plants.”)

I write this article just after having this breakthrough realization. I’ve been creating a lot of quizzes for the store lately and wanted to write down all my thoughts and lessons learned. As such, it will take a while for this concept to show up regularly in our quizzes, and we’re looking for a way to build it right into our quizzing system. Until then, you can apply this methodology yourself with any topic you want to teach/test!

Conclusion

These were my thoughts about educational quizzes. On how to turn them from tests into learning experiences. To turn them from merely checking if you happen to have certain knowledge, to actually teaching you and guiding you through acquiring that knowledge.

The big takeaways, I think, are that …

• Testing =/= teaching. It’s literally impossible for a kid to know something if it has never seen it before. It is unlikely they know it if they’ve rarely seen it before, and if the last time they did was a year ago.
• As such, give as much information away as possible. Give all the information that is probably impossible to know otherwise.
• Use clever hints and clues to turn questions into “puzzles”. Into something that you can figure out. If you put in the effort, you will learn the right answer on the spot.
• Connect individual questions, and mix easy/familiar ones with hard ones, to help players learn by association. You need a starting point from which you can leap to some new place. (And to give them enough rewards and self-confidence along the way to keep playing.)
• If at all possible, use the “step by step building of information”. Cleverly construct and order your questions such that, over the course of the quiz, you build the knowledge and associations needed to answer some really tough and interesting questions by the end.

This is basically our current knowledge about how people learn (efficiently) … but applied to quizzes.

We hope people enjoy our quizzes and use them as educational tools too. Until next time!