Last weekend, my girlfriend and I set up a remote quiz for our friends. This post discusses the setup that we used. Read ahead if you consider setting up a remote quiz for your friends and/or family.

Technical requirements

First up are the technical requirements. You and your friends will need to prepare a few things:

Hardware:

  • Host (you):
    • One laptop to share the quiz screen from.
    • Second laptop or second monitor for your first laptop so you can still see the webcam feeds of your friends. It’s nice to see them react to questions and dance to music.
    • Optional extra device (e.g. iPad). You may want to give some detailed introductions or explanations to some of the questions. You can read these from an extra device. A sheet of paper is also an option.
  • Your friends:
    • One laptop or other big screen device to view the quiz on.
    • Phone to answer quiz questions with.
    • If some of your friends live together, they can join in with one laptop and multiple phones.

Software:

  • Group video chat service. We decided to go for Whereby.com. The free version allows you set up a call with 4 people. The paid version is $10 per month and allows you to set up call with up to 12 people. Our setup includes 2 laptops, so we need at least 2 slots for our streams. So we decided to go for the paid version. And I think $10 is small price to pay for some more remote flexibility. I also like that Whereby does not require any install to join a meeting room. Yikes, I sound like a Whereby sales guy.
  • Quiz platform. Set up a quiz in an online platform. We chose Kahoot.

Food & drinks:

  • Make sure you and your friends are setup with some drinks and some little snacks. Without food & drinks, there’s no such thing as a good quiz.

Here’s a picture of our setup (including some food & drinks):

Testing your setup

I can highly recommend testing your setup before you run the quiz for your friends. You can already test the video chat service before you have your quiz ready. Set up a group chat room for your friends and hang out a bit with them. It helps them get familiar to the virtual environment. And as an added bonus: you now have a nice virtual room for your friends to hang out in!

To test your quiz setup, you’ll need at least 4 devices. If you live together with your partner, a room mate, or friend, you can use them as a dummy-remote-friend. These are the things you would need to test:

  • Host / Laptop 1: share the quiz screen.
  • Host / Laptop 2 or Monitor 2: see the webcam feeds of your friends.
    • If you use a second laptop, make sure to turn of your sound and microphone. If you don’t, you may cause great damage to your friends’ ears.
  • Friend 1 / Laptop: view the quiz screen.
  • Friend 1 / Phone: answer the quiz questions from the Kahoot website or Kahoot app.

Make sure your dummy friend is in another room. Otherwise you won’t be able to test your audio setup properly.

Quiz content

Kahoot allows you to use pre-made quizzes. But I think it’s more fun to make your own. You can make the quiz content a good fit for your friends. Besides tweaking generic question about things like sports, movies, and food, you can add some truly personal questions. I opened my old hard drive and used some pictures of the past 10 years for questions. It’s a good combination of nostalgia and fun. And it was, of course, a good memory test for my friends.

Some bones tips for you quiz:

  • You can use Kahoot’s Excel templates to more easily set up your quiz!
  • Questions are a bit more fun if you include images. So try to include images in as many questions as possible.

There are also two quiz content ideas I want to share.

Quiz Content Idea 1: Music

Our quiz included some music questions. In this round, we asked our friends to finish the lyrics. Nothing fancy here. Just look up a couple of familiar songs, decide a nice moment to pause the music, and give them 4 possible answers. It’s fun to come up with alternative and believable answers for some songs! Do make sure to properly test your audio setup. We have a decent external USB mic and used a Bluetooth speaker to play the music through. You’ll have to verify if the sound comes through nicely on the other end.

For this round, ask all your friends to mute their microphones. Ask them to show a thumbs up if they can hear it correctly (as they can’t say it during this round).

Quiz Content Idea 2: Tour of the house

Now this was really fun. We had a round that included a video tour of the house. This round is easy to set up. You join the chat room with your phone and give your friends a tour of the house/apartment you live in. Make sure mention lots of little details. During the quiz, one of the rounds is about this tour. They’ll have to answer various questions, for example:

What was the colour of the vinyl record on the record player?

Timewise you may want to do the tour before the quiz and do the round of questions somewhere to the end of the quiz!

Happy quizzing!

I hope this post can help those that want to setup a nice remote quiz for their friends or family. And don’t forget the most important thing here is: have fun!