Quiz Night

29 Nov 2017

Summary - In a nutshell, what did you do.

Unprecedented amounts of fun, combined with banter, education and forming the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood.

People got to meet new friends on their teams in the quiz and have a laugh while hotly debating which of the answers to the questions seemed most correct.

Food was provided afterwards and all round it was a good laugh. We slipped in a couple of the ambiguous answers to the quiz to get a bit of controversy going, keeping people engaged and fired up.

1. Benefits/Goodness ( What was good )

We organised the quiz during freshers week (first week) at our university to provide a casual alternative to most of the college organised events that would have involved alcohol.

The quiz was open to all and we wrote the questions such that it would be easy for people of any degrees of faith to attend.

People got to bond with their team mates throughout the night and left better friends than when they arrived.

Eager new students got to flex their intellectual acumen and see who had the best general knowledge. We intentionally made sure the quiz was multiple-choice so that it would be more engaging for people who didn’t know the answers; as they could discuss the plausibility of the different options among their team.

We provided a relaxed atmosphere where people could snack on free food and at the end of the evening we had pizza for everyone as people broke out of their teams to mingle with the other quizees!

2. Step-by-step ( What did you guys do )

Pre-setup

Book out a room with:

A projector for showing the quiz, multiple choice answers and pictures on screen. pictures are important as a picture round is good fun!
Chairs, and ideally tables, that can be arranged into teams of four-six. These can’t be too close to each other as otherwise people will overhear and can listen to other teams. A couple of metres between each team is fine. Leave one table free for snacks and food too!
A lectern from which the quizmaster can present the quiz.

Write a quiz!

A multiple choice quiz is good as eveeyone can give it a go

Pick a fun quiz quiz master!

Someone who can make a few jokes and keep the room feeling a bit lively.
We didn’t tell the quiz master the answers, this made him a better host as he was able to sincerely joke about some of the questions say things like (Wow, that’s a hard one).

Organise Food

Decide which pizza / catering you want for the night, and see if you can find sponsorship.
Have a couple of people buy snacks beforehand. Ideally nibbles like cookies, halal sweets (halalibos), crisps, cakes, fruit and soft drinks.We tried to buy foods that were individually wrapped, like individually wrapped cakes, so that we could reuse them for our next event.

Invite people!

Get the word out via text, email, social media, word of mouth, announcement after jummuah, the whole lot! Get the Student Union to help you advertise to new students and be sure to tell people about it at Freshers’ fair!

Make sure someone has a laptop with the right wire to plug into the projector, we forgot this and someone had to cycle home to pick up an HDMI adapter! If the projector is already plugged into a computer, make sure you’ll have internet access to get a copy of the quiz or you have a thumb drive with a copy of the quiz.

Buy a prize for the winning team!

We bought a few small boxes of chocolate for each person on the team.
We were hosting quite an academic crowd so we also bought some nice books about Islam as prizes.

On the night

We ushered people to the venue, making sure to have enough people waiting at the entrance and guiding people through to the hall where we held it.

We had a few people bring different snacks. One person delegated for snacks a few people delegated to drinks as they’re heavier. Made sure to bring paper plates and plastic cups.

We had a few people come early to help us set up the room, make sure the tables were laid out so everyone could sit in teams of 5 and see the quiz-master.

Our quiz had several rounds. After each round, teams swapped with the people next to them and marked the quiz. Then we kept a scoreboard of which team was ahead. Kept it a bit competitive.

After the last round we did pizza. People mingled and after a while we cleared the venue, started to put the chairs away to tidy up and had a few volunteers help us with cleanup.

3. Challenges & potential sticking points ( What was hard )

Writing the quiz was quite hard for us!

We had to get a group of us to sit down and try to come up with the questions that weren’t going to be too hard or too easy for our audience. We didn’t want any team to be able to get everything right, but also we didn’t want there to be teams that got close to nothing right.

We made sure the questions were on different themes and came from different people. We had different rounds, and in future years we changed some rounds, these were rounds like:

General Knowledge
Islam
Islamic history
Islam and modernity
Picture round
Famous mosques
Anything!

Our other main challenge was logistics on the night. We forgot to bring an adapter for plugging a laptop into the projector. We also had to signpost the venue properly so it was easy for people to find. Pizza was late, which we could have fixed by ordering earlier and specifying a delivery time!

4. Logistical tips (Tips for others )

The quiz takes a surprisingly long time to write!

We had 1 section on Islam but we didn’t want to isolate people who were less learned so we made the questions relatively easy and limited religion to 1 round out of the 4.

Make sure the venue is easy to find for new people.

Order food so it comes in good time and make sure you have a few designated people beforehand to get snacks and set them up. As well as some people to hang around and clean things up afterwards.

5. Further improvements (How would you want to improve the event if you had more resources.)

Our quiz was quite basic, could have had nicer design on the slides.

With a larger budget and more volunteers could have served nicer food than just pizza.

With a larger budget could have bought a bigger prize for the winners and smaller prices for the runners up.

Ending notes ( Closing remarks, thoughts, well wishes and advice. )

Alhumdulillah What initially we thought would be a relatively quiet event ended up being a really lively evening of fun, banter, competition, learning and good food! An unprecedented success that our ISoc went on to host again in future years.