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Tips and tricks

This chapter contains some general advice, thoughts, and recommendations for successfully creating and running your quiz shows (in random order).

Know your system

You do not want to stand in front of a 150-person audience while ill-prepared. So, know how the system works, how to operate it, its limitations, and what to do in case things don’t go as expected.

Test your quiz

With the many available options, it is easy to forget to set a particular option, resulting in a quiz slide that behaves differently than expected. You can test-drive your quiz with the keypad simulation option in Studio: lean back and watch your quiz run while the system acts as if there is a real audience. Also, make sure you have set the right ‘correct answer’ on multiple-choice slides — you do not want to argue with the audience about what the correct answer was. If you do make a mistake, however, you can always undo the last question in QuizXpress Director!

Organize your quiz in rounds of similar questions

Creating different rounds with the same type of questions is easier for your audience to follow. Some ideas for rounds are:

  • A ‘Get the picture’ round that has questions with pictures partially hidden with one of the effects

  • A ‘Guess the artist’ round where you play a part of a song on each slide and the audience needs to guess the artist (note: to make it less easy, you can provide only the first letters of the artists in the answers)

  • A ‘True/False’ round, with statements that the audience must validate.

  • A Trivia Ladder round

  • A Last Man Standing round where people drop off until only one is left

Also, it is better not to mix open questions and multiple-choice questions in one round, because each type of question has a different way of providing input (different keys on the keypad), which may confuse your audience if every question is different.

Keep your quiz small by keeping media files external (or use the pack function)

With QX4, you can keep both your sound and video files external. This keeps your quiz files small and manageable. You can keep the files at their original path, or store them in the folder where the quiz file itself is stored. When copying your quiz to another computer, you’ll need to copy all external files as well (in which case you’ll probably always want to put the files in the folder with the quiz file), or use the ‘Pack’ function to create a distributable quiz with all media embedded. When QuizXpress Live starts, it will check whether all external files are accessible and give a warning if not.

Have a backup system

For a critical event, you may want to consider setting up a backup environment. This means having a second computer and/or a second RF receiver and cable, programmed with the identical ID as your main receiver. This is needed because each keypad is paired with a single receiver, so normally you cannot simply swap your receiver. However, we can provide you with a receiver that has the exact same ID as your main receiver. This way, you can simply swap the receiver if it breaks, or move to another computer without reprogramming your keypads. Please contact us for more details.

Know your target device

QuizXpress supports three different aspect ratios for the slides: 4:3, 16:9, and 16:10. For a standard beamer, you should use 4:3; however, when running your quiz on a widescreen TV set, you’ll want to use 16:9, as it will look much better without large areas of unused space on the sides. As of QX5, you can change the aspect ratio on the fly in Studio. Make sure, however, to inspect your slides afterward.

Explain the system to your audience

Start your quiz with a couple of slides that explain how the system works, how to operate the keypads, how you’ve set up your score system (e.g., with decreasing points), etc. After that, you can insert a couple of test questions that won’t affect the scores but behave like real questions.

Use shapes and text

In QuizXpress, you can add text (or a picture) to your slide that becomes visible after the question is finished (everyone has answered, or time is up). For example, for an ‘open’ question, you can show the correct answer as a piece of text this way.