How to run a session

Everyone answers every question on their phone, and a team scores on whatever most of its members chose. The room sees how the answers were spread across the options before anyone sees the explanation.

It handles 200 phones. You will need a laptop, a projector, and about 15 minutes of preparation beforehand.

/tour walks through the three screens side by side, one moment at a time, with what each shows and what you press. Nothing on it is live, so it is safe to click around and safe to show a room.

This part is worth doing the day before, when there is time to fix a bad import.

1. Sign in at /author.
2. Create a question bank and add questions, either in the editor or by importing a CSV. The list has search and a category filter, so finding one question to fix does not mean scrolling.
3. Create a game. Choose how many rounds you want, one or two, then two to five categories and three to five rows in each. Click a cell to put a question in it.
4. Pick the final question. Every game needs one and a game without one will not launch.
5. Set the defaults: timer, team count, half points for other teams, call mode, speed bonus.

Importing questions from CSV

The columns can be in any order, but the headers have to match:

category, difficulty, stem, option_a, option_b, option_c, option_d, option_e, correct, explanation, reference_url, teaching_note

• Leave option columns blank for questions with fewer than five choices.
• correct is a letter, A to E.
• teaching_note appears only on the host control bar. It is never sent to a phone or to the room display.
• The importer checks the whole file before it writes anything, and tells you the row number of each problem it finds. If there are errors it imports nothing at all, so you will not end up with half a bank.

Two people with the same name

The second Sarah becomes Sarah 2. Otherwise the podium lists the same name twice and calling on Sarah is a guess.

When class runs out of time

Skip to the final, on the control bar while the board is up, abandons the questions still on the board and goes straight to the final. Scores so far are kept, and it tells you how many questions you are giving up before it does anything. Better than stopping mid-board, since the final is the part that decides the game.

Setting the number of teams

The team count sits on your control bar during the lobby, not on the board area, so it never appears on the projector. Set it once people have arrived. Everything else about the format lives in one box at the top of the game page, and that is what the session runs with: there is no second copy of those settings and no per-session override to keep track of.

Difficulty ratings

A question can carry a rating from 1 to 5. One is a warm-up nearly everyone gets, three splits the middle of the room, five is expert. It is optional.

It is not the point value. The value comes from where a question sits on the board; the rating is what helps you decide where to put it. Filling the 500 row, the picker offers the fives first and has a tick to show only those.

Putting a picture on a question

Open a question in the editor and drag an image in, paste one from the clipboard, or choose a file. A second slot holds an image for the explanation, which appears after the reveal. The room screen shows the picture beside the answer choices; phones show a thumbnail that opens full screen on a tap.

How many you can add at once

A CSV import takes up to five questions at a time, which is one category’s worth. Split a longer file and import it in parts. Adding questions one at a time in the editor has no limit. Administrators can import any size.

How a game is laid out

Round one runs 100 to 500 down the column. If you add a second round it uses its own categories and the values double, 200 to 1000, so a team that has fallen behind can still catch up. The point values are fixed, which saves you deciding what each row is worth.

Play moves to round two on its own once the last cell of round one is gone. The room display says which round is up. After the last round comes the final question, which every game ends with.

You do not have to do anything. The room display shows the rules beside the join code while people are arriving, and clears them when the game starts. That is the only minute anyone will read them, which is why they live there rather than on a page you have to remember to open.

They cover how teams work, that everyone answers rather than only the picking team, majority scoring, changing your mind, and the final wager. Read them out or leave them up. /rules is the same screen on its own, for a laptop or a printout.

1. On the computer connected to the projector, open /room and bookmark it. That machine needs nothing else.
2. On your laptop, open /host and launch the session from your game.
3. Type the six character code into the room computer and click Show the game.
4. Put that browser window full screen.

It remembers the last code, so if the room computer restarts mid-session you reconnect with one click. If you would rather skip the typing, open /room?code=XXXXXX. The host screen prints that address once a game is running.

1. On the board page, click Launch session.
2. Change whatever you need for this session. Team count is the setting you will reach for most, since the headcount is never known until people are in the room. Anything you change here leaves the saved board alone.
3. A six character code and a QR code appear on both screens. Participants scan or type it.
4. Each person enters a name and chooses whether they are willing to be called on.
5. When the room has settled, adjust the team count if needed, then click Lock lobby & assign teams, then Start game.

Teams are assigned round robin over everyone in the lobby, in the order they joined. Anyone who arrives after that goes to whichever team is smallest.

Never run one before? /demo plays a real game against synthetic participants, with no setup and no account. Play along and the app runs the game while you answer on your own device; take the controls and you drive the real host screen while eight synthetic participants answer. It is a real session with a real code, so people in front of you can join it on their phones.

A session has two codes. The join code is what phones use, and it is on the projector all game. The host code is what lets a browser drive the game, and only whoever launched it sees it: it is in the launch link and in Sessions. You never type either for your own games, since being signed in and owning the session is enough. To hand the room to a colleague with no account, give them both codes and send them to /host.

Teams are always assigned at random when you lock the lobby. You then get a screen showing who landed where, and you can change it before you start. That is what it is for: nobody wants to place forty people by hand, but you might want to split up three colleagues who arrived together, or spread the experienced people around. Three changes, not forty.

Drag a name onto a team, or tap the name and then tap the team, which is easier on a tablet. Shuffle again throws the whole assignment afresh if the first one is lopsided, and the sizes are shown live with a warning if the teams drift more than one person apart. Anyone who joins after this goes to whichever team is smallest and appears on the screen so you can move them.

Somebody joined twice

This is common and it causes real trouble. A phone reloads, the name gets typed again, and now there is a duplicate: it sits on a team, it is counted in the “answers in” tally so that team never reads as finished, and it can be called on to explain an answer it never gave.

The People button on your control bar opens the same screen at any point in the game. Everyone is listed by team, with a cross beside each name to take them out. Names are flagged when nothing is attached to them, and when two names differ only by a number, since a second join under the same name is renamed rather than refused: “Ada” and “Ada 2” is almost always one person. The button carries a count when somebody has no phone attached.

Removing someone mid-question is deliberate, because that is usually when you notice. Their phone goes back to the join screen. Teams themselves are fixed once the game starts, since answers are already recorded against them and moving somebody would rewrite whose score is whose.

1. You open the cell. The team whose turn it is calls out a category and a value, and you click it. Phones show whose turn it is and nothing to press, so one fast thumb cannot choose for the whole team.
2. Every team answers, not only the picking team. A participant can change their own answer until answers lock, and their last tap is the one submitted. The team’s answer is the majority of those.
3. Click Lock answers when the room is done, or let the timer run out. +15s adds time if they need it, and Skip drops the question entirely.
4. Click Reveal, then Next three times: the correct answer with a bar per option split by team, then the explanation, then the scoreboard.

While a question is open you can see how many people on each team have answered, though not what any of them chose. Nobody sees that until the reveal.

While the board is up, it hands the choice of category to one person rather than letting the loudest voice decide. It draws from the team whose turn it is, their name goes on the projector, and their phone tells them to choose. You still click the cell they call out.

During the reveal, Call on someone draws a name for you. You can filter the draw by answered correctly, answered incorrectly, picking team, or any team. It favours people who have not been called on yet, which spreads it around rather than landing on the same few people all session.

Their phone buzzes and shows the prompt, and their name and team go up on the room display. Re-roll draws someone else if you would rather, and Donereturns their phone to normal. There is no limit on how many people you call on for a single question.

The majority rule catches people out fairly often. A team with two right answers and three wrong ones scores nothing at all.

Every account is an author and keeps its own question banks, games and sessions. Two people signing in to this site do not see each other’s material, unless a bank is shared.

Administrators, set by the site’s owner, get one extra page. It lists everyone registered, every session anyone has run, how each question has performed across all of them, and all the end-of-game feedback grouped by game. Backing up and restoring lives there too: the download is a copy of everything you have written, and a restore goes into your own account rather than the one the file came from.

If you forget your password

The site does not send email, so there is no reset form to fill in. Ask an administrator, who can create a one-time link for you. It lasts an hour and works once. Using it signs you in and signs out anything else that was signed in as you.

Sessions keeps every game you have run, with the final scores, the correct rate per question per team, who you called on, and a replay of each reveal. The answer data and the call log export as CSV from the same page.

Analytics is three views, because there are three different questions.

My sessions is how the questions you asked went in the rooms you ran, filtered to one game if you want. Question performance is how a question behaves across everyone who has used it, which is the point of sharing a bank: five rooms tell you more about a question than one. It shows the correct rate over time, which distractors people actually pick, a discrimination index, and flags questions that are too easy, too hard, carry a distractor nobody ever chooses, or fail to separate strong answers from weak ones. Feedback is what the room said afterwards.

Every rate carries the number of answers behind it, and anything under thirty is greyed out: that is a handful of people rather than a finding.