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Need help brainstorming questions for a political trivia contest
ChopperDave
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I go to a graduate school of public policy (read: politics, government, and international affairs) and am an active board member of the school's Democratic Party student group. Last semester, in collaboration with the Republicans and Progressives, we organized a "political trivia" competition at a nearby pub. The event itself was super successful and a good time, but the triviamasters clearly didn't know what they were doing -- everyone complained afterward that the questions were far too easy. I mean, "Who wrote the U.S. Declaration of Independence?" Come on, trivia's supposed to be more challenging than that!
We all agreed to plan a follow-up, and because I'm the only person on the board with "trivia experience," I got roped into planning the thing. The thing is, all of my "experience" is in playing trivia, not running it. While I have a good idea of how I'm going to run the event, I haven't had to brainstorm questions before. And I'm constrained on topics, too!
I'm looking mostly for "fill in the blank" style questions.The question topics needs to be related to politics, government, or international affairs somehow. I'll take geography, history, political theory, related pop culture (e.g "In The West Wing, What's the name of the Republican who ran against President Bartlet in his re-election campaign?")... whatever can be reasonably connected. While a majority of the students here are American, we have a large population of international students so some questions about other countries (particularly Canada, the UK, and Australia) are fair game as well.
If you guys can link me to any online resources for putting together trivia questions, that'd be great. Thanks!
We all agreed to plan a follow-up, and because I'm the only person on the board with "trivia experience," I got roped into planning the thing. The thing is, all of my "experience" is in playing trivia, not running it. While I have a good idea of how I'm going to run the event, I haven't had to brainstorm questions before. And I'm constrained on topics, too!
I'm looking mostly for "fill in the blank" style questions.The question topics needs to be related to politics, government, or international affairs somehow. I'll take geography, history, political theory, related pop culture (e.g "In The West Wing, What's the name of the Republican who ran against President Bartlet in his re-election campaign?")... whatever can be reasonably connected. While a majority of the students here are American, we have a large population of international students so some questions about other countries (particularly Canada, the UK, and Australia) are fair game as well.
If you guys can link me to any online resources for putting together trivia questions, that'd be great. Thanks!
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This is the ONLY part that we will do. We will not write your questions for you. If I find that we are, this thread will be locked.
For inspiration I'd suggest the old classics Wikipedia and TV tropes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Prime_Ministers
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PoliticsTropes
It's split into 2 halves, with a halftime question and a final question as well. Each half is split into 3 rounds, with 3 questions per round, and in the first half the questions are worth 5-3-1 and 6-4-2 in the second. In each round you wager those points for each question but you can only use each point value once per round. you can not lose points here, just gain so throwing out a guess for a question you dont know doesn't hurt
The halftime question works differently in that it's a question with 4 right answers (such as, after china what are the 4 most populated countries in the world?) and you get 2 points for each right answer, but again no points lost for wrong answers
The final question can be anything, but you can wager upto 15 points and this is the only time points can also be lost. So you can get some intense final jeopardy type moments here
You just read the question, put a song on to play as a timer, and have each team/group bring you their answer written down on a piece of paper, with the halftime being 2 songs worth of answer time. This usually takes around 2.5 hours to go through, ends up being a ton of fun, and you'll only need 20 questions to complete the whole event. Having backup questions in case someone shouts out an answer accidentally is also a great idea.
For extra fun, use Reagan quotes about things that Republicans no longer support.
Hmm, those are some interesting ideas there. I like the wagering point values concept.
Right now I'm planning on borrowing a format from this really great trivia group in DC. The way they do it is to split it into 5 rounds, 3 "normal" and two "speed rounds."
A speed round usually involves a worksheet or something similarly fun, like matching song names to musical clips. My plan is for speed round 1 to have a worksheet with pictures of movie presidents, and the players will have to name the movie and the character (possibly with a word bank if the latter is too difficult). Speed round 2 will involve me playing clips of campaign songs and the contestants matching them to the proper candidates. (I wonder how many people will realize that "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" was McGovern's campaign song?)
Normal rounds have around 8 questions, with one being a "multiple answer" problem. If you feel like you did really well in one round, you can opt to "double down" and see your score doubled for that round. You can only do that for one of the three normal rounds, though, so you have to strategize in that respect.
Heh, Foreign Policy just did a "Whose quote?" article comparing Santorum vs. Ayatollah Khomeini. Might have to borrow that...
True or false rounds are really good too, especially if you have politicians who say or do ridiculous things, and you can come up with similarly plausible ridiculous things. There was a category like that about Richard Branson "Once had a contestant on his reality show agree to go over Niagra falls in a barrel" was one of the questions... that one was true.
Similarly, there are ______ or ______ rounds. We had a really difficult one that was Tennessee, Kentucky, or Both.
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