The Writing Life of a Tadpole

Head-to-head matchup: HD Quiz vs. Quiz and Survey Master vs. Quiz Maker

October 8 2020

I’ve been blogging the last week about various options to run trivia quizzes on my website, ranging from basic plugins to premium plugins or even embedding quizzes from external platforms (either dedicated to trivia like Kahoot or generic forms with a quiz option like MS or Google Forms). In my last post (Considering different trivia managers), I covered a huge list and while some of them were awesome in their own right, I have a very specific goal in mind with five criteria.

I narrowed it down to three free plugins for WordPress and for the head-to-head matchup, I am ONLY considering the basic plugin, not the premium options.

Setting up my criteria

For scoring/results, I’m looking for something other than just a score, all of them do that obviously. However, some of the full list of plugins added extra clicks to see the results, immediate answers per question vs. » Read the rest

Considering different trivia managers

October 4 2020

As I’ve mentioned in some recent posts, I am starting to get re-interested in trivia games online, and since I’ve always wanted trivia games on my site, I decided to do a shallow but extensive dive into various tools that will let me run trivia games on my website. Since I run my site with WordPress, I started with plugin options, and various lists of the top quiz plugins to consider and then branched out to other options.

While the idea of a really advanced quiz plugin sounds appealing in theory with power out the wazoo, the reality is that my needs are actually quite simple. I need:

Scoring
Basic but decent styling.

In other words, I need it to automatically calculate the score AND not look like it was programmed in MS DOS. Beyond that, my “nice to have” list includes:

Different types of question formats, although almost all will be multiple choice;
A timer so people can’t simply Google the answers; and,
Some way to track results over time.

» Read the rest

Today I choose to change how I write about choice (TIC00068f)

October 2 2020

So, I am on iteration “f” of my series of posts about the choices I make each day, having broken my “Seinfeld” chain on five previous occasions to go from a through b, c, d and e to get to f. And overall, I’m on 68 days of noting how I’m doing on making conscious choices.

Yet I find myself struggling to find a topic some nights. Often I had a good day, I did make choices, but in some cases it might have been the same choice I made last week that is starting to be part of my routine. Or it was all relatively simple choices, and not really worthy of a post.

A couple of those “breaks” in series were more technical in nature, where I was unable to post for a few days and so I “broke” the chain. I didn’t break the chain of choices, I just broke the chain of writing about it. » Read the rest

Today I choose to play with Kahoot (TIC00067f)

October 2 2020

For those reading the post yesterday about my love of trivia, you already know that I am helping out with a trivia game for our Charitable Campaign at work. The exact FORMAT of that trivia game is still to be determined.

I have a few options, and a number of variables that complicate the game. First and foremost, it has to be fully bilingual. We’re a bilingual workforce, anglophone and francophone players may both want to play, and I need to have a game (*) available they both (*) can play. I put asterisks in that sentence because one of the variables is that I could simply run a game in English for anglophones and a separate game in French for francophones.

Second, since we can’t do the game in-person, I need an online option. That basically divides itself into three options:

By email like I used to do — people would get the questions by email, they could respond, and I would score them…heck I think I even still have the scoring spreadsheet that helped me format things!;

» Read the rest

Today I choose to embrace the trivial (TIC00066f)

October 1 2020

In the beginning there was TP

I confess, my title went for a small play on words. I also confess that I love trivia games. Ever since I was about 13 years old, and we got the original Trivial Pursuit, I have played trivia games out the wazoo. I don’t care if it is done competitively or cooperatively or even solely, I like the Q&A formats.

I liked watching Jeopardy, particularly as it has lots of questions in a row, but it is almost too fast at times. In a few cases, I’d like to think about the answer for a couple of seconds to talk myself out of some stupid random guess. Alternatively, a lot of online trivia and even the pub offerings by Buzz are the opposite problem — too much delay in between rounds and questions.

Flash forward to the late 1990s

A little over 20 years ago, I was doing a lot of stuff by email list. » Read the rest