Recently, I created a quiz in Google Forms, for a presentation at work, based loosely on the popular trivia app HQ (with the much-needed assistance of my coworker Bethany!). The idea was to test our coworkers before presentation breaks to see who remembered the slides best, with the added element of competition and prizes.

For those unfamiliar with HQ, it is a live trivia app which gives away cash prizes to its winners. Bethany was our host, a real competitor for the punning expertise of Scott Rogowsky. We deviated in a few key ways from the real app in order to create something our coworkers would enjoy. We got rid of the player elimination after wrong answers because we wanted to keep them engaged. In general, the spirit of the game was to keep it fun and not get intense about rules.

I tested several live polling options to see what worked best for our needs. In the end, we landed on Google Forms because of its simplicity and my familiarity with the product. We added gifs to add some fun to the interface, one as part of the header and one as the intro logo on the opening section.

One benefit of using Google Forms was that we could quickly review what people had missed. This was another way that we deviated from HQ proper. We showed the charts of how many had guessed any given answer at the end of the round instead of after each question. Google Forms had the option to show the participants these graphs right after they submitted on their phones but we opted to show them to the group on the screen instead.

One of the challenges of using Google Forms was that reordering sections sometimes required me to clear my browser cache before it would appear as moved. This was tricky to work around as we had 12 questions per round and I built the first round by duplicating sections and trying the moved them into the correct order. Were I to do it again, I would probably write out the structure I wanted ahead of time and then build the sections in order.

I structured the game like this:

1. Intro Section

This was the first section that the user would see.

It started with the easiest question, “What is your name?” This allowed me to identify the winners.

2. Question Section

This is exactly what it sounds like.

For each question, I had a section which wrote out the question (which was also read out loud) and showed the 3 multiple choice options.

3. FREEZE Section

The way this quiz was built, technically the user could breeze right through to the end and not wait for questions to get read out loud. In order to promote a bit more fairness, we added a section marked “FREEZE!” before sharing the answer to the question. It did not actually stop people from working ahead but we weren’t concerned with that. It was just a way to slow down what was already a fast paced game and remind those breezing through that we would notice in the end (See 5).

4. Answer Review Section

After the brief pause that FREEZE provided, we moved on to a quick review of the answer to the question asked. Again, we were not concerned with cheating because if someone worked ahead and then hit back in order to get more correct doesn’t that just mean they were studying the content?

(Repeat 2-4 For Each Question)

5. Final Question Section

This one was the only question which did not include a FREEZE or an answer review. The idea was that we would use the time code for the submission as a tiebreaker if multiple people got all of the answers correct. Google forms creates a spreadsheet of the submissions in real time so I was able to shout out the winner as soon as the round was over

For the final round, I combined their scores from each round and used their rank in each round as a determination for the final ultimate winner.

Final thoughts:

This was a fun, interactive, and relatively simple way to keep people involved between presentations. Not everyone participated but ultimately I think having the content reviewed helped them as well. They were all very impressed with being able to use their phones to participate in the game and were excited to share a version of the game with our clients. All around a great time!