Letztes Jahr in Fragen 2020

Premise

Towards the end of 2019, my good friend Giorgio and I had the idea to host a quiz, where we would question contestants about events that occured in the years between 2010 and 2019. The event was a full success and we wanted to continue with a quiz about the year 2020. With the COVID-19 pandemic prohibiting any in person events we had to tackle the challenge of hosting a quiz remotely and in real-time.

Look and Feel

With everyone in desperate need of having an event to look forward to, we wanted to bless all of our friends with a nice experience. Because the event would be held online, we wanted all of the things leading up to the event to be as personal as possible. One obvious choice was to stear away from an online and social media based promotion and have physical invitations that we would deliver to everyone invited.

The invitation design was inspired by the 1920's, although we kept it a bit more minimalistic and with less intricate details. We had them printed with white paint on thick, heavy black paper.

Promotional Material

We put a QR code on the invitation which brought people to a sign up form for our newsletter. This would be our main mode of communication from then on.

We sent out mulitple newsletters containing information about how to signup for the event and most importantly explaining how the quiz would be played.

Technical Implementation

We had a lot of requirements for the technical implementation of the quiz, all of which were crucial for the success of the event:

1. Two-Way Communication

Because we didn't want the quiz to feel like a boring school lesson, it was really important for us that the participating teams would have an easy and intuitive way to communicate with us. So a livestream on twitch or any other livestreaming platform really wasnt an option. Even more so because of the long delay most of these platforms have. In the end we settled for a discord server which would be created especially for this event. Everybody was able to join the server where they could watch our livestream and talk to us, all in real-time.

2. Quiz tool

At first, we considered programming a custom webapp on which one would be able to play & host quizes online. We then quickly realised, that such a big project wouldn't be feasible in the given timeframe. After some research about existing tools we opted for kahoot, a popular online quiz service. We prepared all rounds of the quiz on there and had all participating teams join the corresponding sessions via invite link.