Slides, Quiz Questions and Polls, All in One Game

Until now, you picked the kind of game before you wrote anything. A trivia game had right answers and a leaderboard. A poll game collected opinions. If you wanted to explain something, check that people understood it, and then ask what they thought, you needed two games and a separate slide deck, and everyone had to join twice.

Now one question set can hold quiz questions, polls and slides, in whatever order you put them. You run the whole thing as one game.

Quiz or poll, one question at a time

When you add a question, you choose whether it's a Quiz or a Poll.

• A quiz question has a right answer and scores points.
• A poll question has no right answer. Nobody scores, and when you close it, everyone sees how the room answered.

Most question types work either way. Multiple choice can be a quiz ("What year did we open the Denver office?") or a poll ("Where should the next offsite be?"). A word cloud can only be a poll, since there's nothing to get right.

Each question in your set shows a Quiz or Poll badge, so you can see the mix at a glance.

Slides between questions

Press Add Slide to put a slide anywhere in the set. Slides are for the parts of a session that aren't questions: a welcome screen, the rules, a bit of teaching before the next round, a thank-you at the end.

You write a slide in Markdown, the plain-text format a lot of note apps use: a # before a heading, a - before each bullet, two asterisks around a word to make it bold. A preview next to the editor shows the slide as you type.

You can add one image to a slide and choose a layout:

• Title and Section, for the opening slide and the start of each round
• Quote, for a quotation set large
• Two columns, where a --- line starts the second column
• Image left, Image right and Full image, for slides built around a picture
• Big number, for one figure you want people to remember

Each slide either waits for you to move on or moves on by itself. Choose Manual or Timed for each one. A timed slide can stay up for anything from 5 seconds to 10 minutes.

Running the game

Go to Play and choose your set as usual. You don't pick between a trivia game and a poll game anymore. Nontrivial works that out from the set.

If the set has polls in it, you'll see two extra settings:

• Show live results lets players watch the answers come in while a poll is still open. It's off by default, so the first few answers don't sway everyone else.
• Anonymous responses hides who answered what. Each person can still answer only once.

Polls don't affect anyone's score, and they're left out of the accuracy figures on the results page.

If a game has no quiz questions at all, just slides and polls, there's no winner, no points and no leaderboard. That suits a meeting or a workshop, where ranking people would be odd.

Ways to use it

• Training. A few slides on the new expense policy, two quiz questions to check it stuck, then a poll: "What's still unclear?"
• Teaching. Open with a poll on what students already know, teach with slides, and finish with a short quiz.
• Team meetings. An agenda slide, a poll on dates for the offsite, and a word cloud to close: "One word for this quarter?"
• Trivia night. A section slide before each round ("Round 2: Geography") and a poll at the end on which round was hardest.

Details

• A slide holds up to 10,000 characters and one image (JPEG, PNG, GIF or WebP). Add alt text so people using screen readers know what the picture shows.
• Your existing poll sets work the same as before.
• In an adaptive set (a Premium feature), every question is a quiz question.

To try it, open Questions, pick a set, and press Add Slide.