SPP - The quiz night
The Schome Park Programme - The quiz night
Description
| The suggestion for a quiz night was first mooted on the forum and received a positive response, so a signup page was posted to the wiki, linked to a scheduled session on the events page. The event was billed as the same time as another event as no-one had signed up to attend, but then feedback in the forums and in-world indicated that a number of people had planned to attend but not signed up, so the event was rescheduled. The quiz was written carefully so as to balance the range of questions across diverse topics and not weight them according to age advantage. Effort was also made to phrase and contextualise questions in a way that prohibited easy search engine queries for the answer. Three staff (including the quiz organiser) and 5 students were present for the duration of the quiz, with others dropping in and out. The organiser ‘read’ the 20 questions one at a time into text chat and set a timer so that respondents, working in pairs, were obliged to IM their answers to the organiser within one minute. This kept some structure to the session and provided another barrier to the search engine solution. |
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Evidence of Learning/ Benefits
All participants in the quiz reflected that they had enjoyed it, and that they had learned from the solutions to those questions they didn’t know. Individual competition was used infrequently in SPii but the challenge of working against friends for the quiz was generally accepted cheerfully and in a spirit of ‘mock’ competition, and all participants supported each other with sensitivity by congratulating on positive results and allowing each others excuses for questions not answered.
Issues/Problems
The replacement signup page for the event on the wiki included the text:
- Back by popular demand! Replaced with the rescheduled SuDoku because we thought no-one wanted to play, but now we hear you just didn't sign up. There's a lesson in there somewhere...;o)
In fact only two people signed up to the rescheduled event and the fluidity that characterised participation in most SPii activities was difficult to accommodate in the quiz, which required each participant to be present and active from the start to the end of the session. Incomers were unintentionally disruptive, interrupting by asking what was going on or answering questions aloud in chat, unaware that others were being competitive through IM. Efforts to anticipate search engine solutions went some way to mitigate for this problem but quick thinking fast timers were definitely an advantaged.
Key Lessons Learned
It was originally intended that the quiz night would be a pilot for a regular event, and ideas for a more innovative use of the environment were captured during the pilot, for example rezzing a famous statue and asking participants to name the sculptor, flashing pictures and testing image recall, timing completion of a puzzle etc.; essentially developing the quiz into an in-world equivalent of TV programme the Krypton Factor. It was recognised that this would provide a solution to the search engine issue, but a major drawback was the amount of development time that would be required to create resources for one-off sessions. If a similar event were organised in the main grid, a significant amount of pre-existing content would be available to buy, making the session more time efficient for the organisers.
NB. Contrary to what the history might indicate, the original version of this was written by Elsa. PeterT just cut and pasted it in here from the original wordprocessed version.
