Proposal for HillHacks 2018

tl;dr A lightning quick talk on what comprises a good quiz question and some tips on how to make one, followed by an activity in which teams are tasked with framing questions that meet a previously agreed-upon definition of 'good'.


Quizzes are cool, people know that now. But far fewer people know the joy of creating the perfect quiz question: one that gives the participants just enough info to be able to answer the question, but not so much that they know that their answer is right. There are some nice resources online on how to crack typical Indian quiz club questions (See Ramanand J's Annotated Quiz ). My goal is to make a half-decent resource/guide to making great questions, and this session will be a experiment in that vein.

In college, the rule we were taught was simple: If the answer to your question, when revealed, makes half the participants go "oh shit, I should've got that one!", then your question was a good one. There are some factors to be noted here:

The talk before the activity begins will go over some tips for designing good quiz questions:

The activity itself will involve splitting the participants into teams of 2 or 3 (depending on turnout). Each team will be given 'fundas' or pieces of interesting trivia. They must each design questions around these fundas, and then present the question to the rest of the teams. The aim of each team is to have precisely half of the participating teams answer the question correctly. The closer that number is to half the total, the more points the team scores for designing that question.

Note: If question goes unanswered, the questioning team is allowed to add hints. The team loses point if a question is correctly answered by all teams.

Note: There are no points for answering a question correctly, what do you think this is, a quiz?

Depending on the enthusiasm, we may have multiple kinds of rounds for question designing: