Set aside some time for interactivity, and plan on spending 2 to 3 minutes on each question (commentary included).
Calculate the duration of a quiz.
A question’s duration is made up of 4 sequences:
- Lecture/understanding by the participants.
- Voting by the participants.
- Displaying of the results.
- Commentary.
These 4 sequences succeed one another in most cases. However, it is also possible to not display the results, to comment on the question at a later time (by placing the results slide further on in the PowerPoint presentation), or to not display the results at all, in which case only the first two sequences are taken into account to determine the question duration.
To calculate the duration of a quiz, we recommend multiplying the total number of questions by:
- 2.30 minutes, if the questions are simple and without displays.
- 3.00 minutes, if the questions are complex and call for commentary following the displaying of their results.
A factor slowing vote reception
The main factor slowing vote reception is a large audience: a room of 100 people takes 50% longer to vote than a room of 15 people.
The cause is not technical in nature (PowerVote can receive hundreds of votes in only a few seconds); rather, it is due to the decreased receptiveness and greater inertia of a larger audience:
conversations among participants, distractions, waiting to see the others vote before beginning, etc.
Tricks for controlling quiz duration:
- Limit the voting time. To speed up the response time, you can limit the amount of time granted the participants to vote, while at the same time displaying a stopwatch. In this way, you create a certain element of stress, which will encourage the participants to vote faster.
- Take into consideration voting speed. If your quiz is scored, you can also take into consideration the voting speed of the participants in calculating and displaying their ranking.
- Organize the voting by teams. You can group your participants into teams, thereby adding an element of team building, while still being able to display the individual results.
The regular displaying of an individual and team-based “”podium”" encourages the entire audience to participate and become involved, and, therefore, to vote more quickly.
