I had been looking for a way to do the "What's Your Genre?" quiz I saw on Mrs. ReaderPants' blog. She graciously invites everyone to use/modify her quiz to fit their needs. I love the idea of the quiz but I had time constraints and younger students to contend with so I wanted to find a way to do the quiz electronically, with no manual adding up involved. Enter PlayBuzz - www.playbuzz.com.
If you're interested in making your own quiz, here's how it's done. First, click on the Create button.
PlayBuzz lets you create a definitive answer quiz, a two choices poll, a list or a personality quiz. Hovering your cursor over the options will bring up a description and examples, like the panel on the right in the image below.
Before I started making the personality quiz I had already created a list of questions and answers to choose from, based on Mrs. Readerpants' quiz. Something you should know early on is that with PlayBuzz you can only have eight possible results at the end. I wanted to create a genre quiz for the ten genres of books I have in my library, so I ended up making two separate quizzes. The bonus is that students get two different genres to look into.
Once you've clicked on the Create button for the personality quiz you will need to sign up, either via Facebook or with email. The name that you register under will show when people do your quiz, so in my case I chose to sign up under our school name.
This screen will then appear:
The media you add next to the game name will be the image people see when they start your quiz. I chose to upload a Wordle made up of the genres in my quiz.
Under "Manage the Questionnaire's Results" click on "Add result" to add more results (answers) to your quiz (up to eight).
Scroll down to enter your first question. You can add media (photo or YouTube clip) for the question itself, but I chose not to. The default setting is for the answers to be text only, but you can change that by clicking on the image box (first arrow below). Images have to be at least 190 x 178 and can be from file or from a URL. I did a Google image search filtered by usage rights to find some photos to use. PlayBuzz automatically inserts a photo attribution for you. You need to be careful when selecting a photo to use because it will need to fit into a square box, so you end up cropping a fair bit. A couple of times I have been unable to use a URL for an image but it has worked if I download it.
To add more answers click on the "Add answer" square.
Next, you need to choose which results are associated with each answer. For example, for the question "What would you most like to do on holiday?" I wanted those whose answer is "Go white water rafting on the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe" to earn points towards the adventure genre. I left the other possible answers at 0 (no association) and changed the adventure result to 2 (strongly associated). You do have the option of entering a 1 for "normal" (a medium association) but I thought it might complicate things and give an extra weighting to certain genres.
Click on "Add question" and repeat the process until you have entered all your questions.
Click on the blue "Preview" button to see what the quiz looks like in action. Then click on the blue "Publish Game" button when you are happy with the quiz. You will get a message "Our editors will review your submission and decide whether to post it on playbuzz.com within 48 hours". To be honest I don't even know if my quizzes are published on the site. What mattered to me was that the links were live and I could embed the quizzes on our website.
You can edit after your quiz is published, which is good news if you spot an error.
I made a QR code so my students can scan it with our library iPads and have a go at the quizzes. Originally I linked straight to the URL for each genre quiz, but I discovered that more games are listed after the quiz, some of which might not be appropriate for children. Embedding on a website allows you to choose not to have recommendations for more games, share buttons or Facebook comments.
In the tradition of Mrs.Readerpants I invite you to use/modify the bits of my quizzes that I modified from hers. Your quiz doesn't have to be about genre though, it could be about a specific book like the Percy Jackson and Divergent examples above. You could even make it specific to your school somehow, I would love to see what you come up with.
