I did a quiz

Eighteen teams took part in our Only Connect style quiz in Bangalore on Sunday. A few pertinent observations and learnings.

The KQA Only Connect style quiz happened yesterday morning to a rousing turnout. To remind you, it was a “direct finals” format, and we had planned for about 12-15 teams, and thought at a stretch we will get 20. We got 18 teams, which for a new format is a very very good turnout. Also, a large part of the crowd I was seeing for the first time ever, suggesting that it managed to draw a lot of “new quizzers” (then again I myself haven’t been that prolific at quizzing for a while now).

The quizmasters with their volunteer (or “little helper”)

A miscalculation

On Saturday, I went to Sapna Book House, close to home, to buy post its. Assuming we should budget for 20 teams, I decided we need 200 post-its of each colour. And then while I was finding four distinct colours (that weren’t too close to each other - Berry was with me and helped select), I had a brainwave - for 12 questions (of the “what comes fourth in the sequence” variety), we only had three clues, and only needed three post-its. So the fourth post-it was moot for this.

And in my infinite wisdom, I purchased 7 packets of 100 post-its each. 2 each of pink, teal and orange, and 1 of fluorescent yellow. As it happened, a fourth of the way through the quiz we were running out of yellows! I had completely failed to take into account that more questions were likely to be attempted on the fourth clue than on the first three.

A case of getting too clever that sort of hit us.

Timing and visuals

The format, as we had designed it, had necessitated an on-screen timer. I took the easy way out. The quiz was exported into a PDF, and side by side with it was the timer. What I had forgotten once again was that when you load two programs side by side on the mac, one needs a minimum of a third of the screen space. That meant the quiz itself (in the PDF) was too small, and people complained of not being able to see the visuals clearly.

We ended up giving 45 seconds per clue (rather than the planned 30 seconds), so that people could take a better look. Thankfully we had some buffer time available, so it didn’t cost us too much.

This is something I need to plan better for the next time.

Coding

The perils (?) of being a computer engineer by training is that you try to over optimise everything. When I started setting the quiz I figured that the process of making the presentation, with 5 slides per question, was going to be rather taxing. Instead, I decided to do it using code.

The questions were written on a shared Google Sheet. I wrote a script in R that would read off this and compile it into a presentation. I possibly spent more time making the quiz this way, than I would have had I simply made the slides by hand.

However, I got to learn a lot on the way. I learnt how to easily add pictures to a ggplot. I learnt how to export a presentation to PowerPoint. I learnt a lot of other nuances that I’d not learnt because for over six months now I’ve not actively coded (though in the last month I’ve started fixing that at my company, as we’ve started building).

Also, coding helped in other ways - on Saturday, Subrat and I had a meeting where we decided which questions to use, and in what order (we had set ~17 per round, and we were only going to use 12). All I had to do was to number the questions accordingly in our Google Sheet, and then run my code. No cumbersome work of editing the presentation!

Oral and Written Quizzes

On Friday night, Subrat and I decided to do a “dry run” of the quiz, to figure out the goodness of the questions that we had set, and any tweaks we needed to do. Subrat recruited eight regulars for a late night Zoom, who we divided into two teams of four, and we did a conventional “only connect” style quiz for them.

The dry run was really useful - we noticed a couple of typos and logical errors. We also knew the reactions to the questions, which helped us whittle down our longlist to 12 questions of each kind.

With full benefit of hindsight, I liked running that dry run far more than running the actual quiz yesterday morning. And I think that is primarily because of the superiority of oral over written quizzes.

In a way, presiding over what is effectively a written quiz (today, all answers were in writing, using the “pounce” format) reminds me of delivering a webinar (though slightly superior to that). In this kind of a format, you don’t get a full “feel” of the crowd.

The enjoyment that happened on Friday in the dry run happened because I could hear the teams discuss loudly, and tell their stories while giving out the answers. With written answers, the stories were extremely concise. There were no “stories”. And that meant lesser feedback for me as the quizmaster (though it didn’t matter since all the questions were preset and we weren’t reading out any questions there) .

This is one crib I have about the pounce format we use in most finals nowadays - it might make the quiz fairer (removing the luck of the draw on who gets what direct), but it results in fewer stories being told, and that makes the quiz less enjoyable.

Intensity

Hosting a quiz from a new format meant it was extremely intense and tiring. As I told you, I had the quiz running on two thirds of the screen and the timer on the remaining third. Every time I switched slides to the next one, I had to make sure I turned on the timer as well. When the timer finished and buzzed, I had the triple task of going to the next slide, turning on the timer again, and turning off the (now buzzing) old timer.

For whatever reason, I’d chosen to keep score on the same laptop (and thus “in public” - participants could see all scores projected), and so after every question I had to swipe to this Excel (in an adjacent workspace on my Mac) and enter all the scores.

This was during the quiz. As soon as I got to Ujjivan in the morning, I had the job of setting up the large screen. This involved multiple trips to get a HDMI cable, get the TV working and then get it connected to my computer. Then I had to take registrations - which again I decided to get clever about by doing on the same Excel sheet. By the time I was done with all of this, it was time to start the quiz (and people were walking in late as well, so I had to take more registrations while doing the quiz).

In the middle of the quiz I wanted to pull up a demo question that wasn’t in my PDF, and I unplugged the HDMI cable. Making the TV recognise my computer again took some effort, and some anxiety on my part.

All in all, I found the whole process rather intense, and at the end of the quiz I didn’t want to talk to anyone. There were quite a few people there who I otherwise would have loved to have a chat with, but I possibly put them off with monosyllables and pleasantries. Subrat invited me for lunch, but again I was zonked enough that I told him I’m going off elsewhere with Berry. And quickly, off we went. And then from the restaurant I remembered that I had to send the photos I’d taken during the quiz and the scoresheet to KQA. I quickly airdropped stuff from my computer to my phone, and sent them on.

Long long ago, I used to call this the “JEE feeling”. 24 years ago, I wrote IIT-JEE (and did rather well). The one thing I remember from that day is coming home in the evening and just lying down blankly. The intense concentration through the day had completely worn me down.

Later, when I got diagnosed with ADHD, I realised this is the effect of forcing myself to (involuntarily) focus on one thing for a long period of time. Maintaining focus comes at a cost to me, even if I’ve engineered this focus through artificial means such as taking methylphenidate (aka Ritalin; Adderall is not licenced in India). And so, even doing my own quiz, which I wanted to do and I rather enjoyed, ended up tiring me out for the day.

Later in the evening, Udupa sent me a message that he loved the quiz, and that this should be an annual fixture. He also said the same on social media.

udupendra

A post shared by @udupendra

Here you see Subrat giving the third prize to Udupa’s team. I had packed off home by then, else I would’ve been in this as well.

In any case, I want to do more quizzes. May not be this precise format, but I want to do a few. Maybe one a season at least, going forward. I’ll tell the KQA.