Virtual Family Trivia Night

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Our guest blogger today is Mary Westness, Youth Services Associate  at the Hedberg Public Library in Janesville.

The most popular program I hosted virtually through the pandemic was a series of themed family trivia nights. 

Our library purchased the Kahoot Pro subscription, which is 36$ for a year. This is the cheapest subscription Kahoot offers, and it provides enough features to host a successful program. The free version doesn’t allow you to insert slides, which was a dealbreaker for me because they really help with the flow of the program. Their more expensive plans have more options (like fill in the blank questions and puzzle clues), but the Pro version works just fine. In Kahoot, you can do trivia two ways: Present and Assign. For a live program (In person or virtual) you choose “present”. You can use assign if you want to create a trivia quiz and allow people to participate on their own time.

I called it Family Trivia Night _____ Edition. Here’s the themes I chose:

• August: General Trivia
• September: Harry Potter Edition
• October: Spooktacular Edition (Fall/Halloween)
• November: Disney Edition
• December: Star Wars Edition
• January: Book to Movie Edition
• February: Cartoon Edition
• March: USA Edition
• April: Picture Book Edition

There was no program in May and June. In July, I tried to do one in person, outdoors in July, but we got rained out and ended up putting the kahoot out as an assigned quiz instead.

Here are some things I learned along the way:

 Tips for Creating the Quiz in Kahoot 

• Format of the quiz for a one hour program: 
• Start with 2-3 practice questions that are worth zero points so participants can get used using Kahoot. You can adjust the point total to zero when creating the question.
• 2 rounds, 25 questions each
• Every five questions, I inserted a corny joke for a little brain break/just for fun. This was two slides: one for the joke and one for the punchline. This was really well received by the players. 
• 10 minute intermission between rounds
• It  helps with the flow of the live program if you add a slide explaining what to expect next if you are switching gears at all. For example, have a slide when switching from practice questions to the actual quiz to alert players that the real round is starting next. Or, have a slide explaining “Your final question for this round is coming up!” right before intermission. It makes it flow much better when presenting it live.  
• Using the “Discover” tab in Kahoot, you can search quizzes other people have made and borrow their questions-I just double check the answers. I also pulled trivia questions just from various websites. Don’t reinvent the wheel, people :) 
• At intermission, people’s devices were put into sleep mode. I found it to be a good idea to put in a poll or sample question after your intermission as a way for them to wake up their devices. Or just a slide that says “Round two begins soon. Wake up your answer device!”
• Stick in a slide after your last question stating, “and the winners are....”. If you don’t do that, the winner's podium will pop up automatically when you’re not ready.

Tips for Running the Program

• Teams Pre-register with an email address so that they can be invited to the meeting. Then, I was able to send them an email with a link to the MS Teams meeting. 
• Virtual Kahoot works best if players use two separate devices: one for joining the “meeting” and one to use as an answer pad. It is doable with two separate browser windows if they don’t have two devices, but it can be challenging for them to know which window to use to answer the questions, and it puts them at a speed disadvantage. I put all of this in the program description and explained it in the email they received.
• When you start the Kahoot quiz, it gives a Game PIN. Patrons go to Kahoot.it on their answer pad device and enter the pin. You can explain this as they enter the call, screen share the pin. I also entered the pin into the chat. 
• Prizes: We gave away book bundles of prize books.
• If Teams are using nicknames in the game, be sure to have them tell you who they are in the chat, or distributing prizes can get…..interesting 

Right now, the program is scheduled to be in our program room this fall with a limit of 40 participants so there’s room for distancing. Currently, our library is requiring masks indoors. If COVID numbers continue to climb, this program will be moved outdoors or it will pivot back to virtual. 

Kahoot saves all of your quizzes in your account, so I’m more than willing to share the ones I have created! 

You can contact Mary at mwestness@hedbergpubliclibrary.org