Become a Quizmaster with Questionable!

Several years ago I worked in a summer camp where Color War was a really, really big deal. During the three-day-long event, campers and staff competed in all sorts of contests, ranging from sports, to singing, to eating, dancing and arts and crafts. One of the highlights of the entire ordeal was a trivia bowl which pitted kids against each other in a quiz show format.

During one of the years that I was in charge of the camp’s technical equipment, we discovered that the quiz show system, which had been built by hand over twenty years earlier out of parts purchased at Radio Shack, had stopped working and was beyond repair. I figured that we could create our own system using computers, but nobody could do it in time and we ended up buying a rather expensive college-bowl-type buzzer system at the last minute. It was really frustrating because I just knew that somewhere, someone had created a quiz show application that would do what I needed… and I couldn’t find it.

Now, years later, I have Questionable. This $25 piece of shareware from The Idiot Project is what I was looking for.

The software allows you to create categories, questions and players then put them together to make a professional looking quiz show on your Mac. You can create up to five categories for a game and use just about any USB device as a buzzer. The game can handle as many players as you can manage to give a buzzer to and it tracks the score for you, leaving you free to ask questions and provide witty repartee in between rounds.

You use a simple interface to create categories and questions and, when you are done, the game builds your game board for you. There is room for up to five categories, but the unregistered version allows you only four. The game automatically gives you a “Host’s View,” in which you select which question to ask, and a “Contestants’ View,” which would ideally be displayed via a projector or second screen. The game creates a professional looking game board with classy animations and a real-time scoreboard; all you have to do is click on the questions, read them, and hit an X or an O to identify right or wrong answers.

I created a quick game in less than twenty minutes and used it to review material with a high school class, who loved it. I put them into two teams and they had a blast with the material while I played game show host. I used a simple external keyboard for buzzers, but you can use mice, game-pads or any other USB device.

The only complaint I have with the app is that the process of creating and editing questions and answers could be more intuitive and Mac-like. Little things, like the ability to tab between fields on the form, don’t work the way they should, and I experienced one crash during the game setup which led me to save my work more frequently while inputting the rest of the questions. Another good addition would be a spell-checker to make sure your questions and answers don’t create errors.

All in all though, Questionable is a unique and useful application with a stable v1.0.1 release. You can download and use it for free (with some limitations) from The Idiot Project’s website and a full license costs only $25. You can share your question files with other users, so I am sure it is only a matter of time before an online repository of pre-built quizzes appears. Download the app and give it a try… and post links in the comments to your question files!

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