QuickQ Trivia
Rapid Daily Trivia Game: Wordle meets Quiz Bowl
Ever wonder how QuickQ conjures up those trivia questions every single day? It's a mix of cutting-edge AI and good old-fashioned quiz bowl magic!
Early on, I knew that great questions were the heart of QuickQ. But with 8 new questions needed daily, I had to get creative. My solution? A two-pronged approach:
Generative AI: I trained a chatbot to write trivia questions. It took a lot of trial and error, but now it's a pro at crafting questions, especially in categories like current events where traditional quiz bowl resources are limited.
Quiz Bowl Databases: I dove headfirst into the vast ocean of quiz bowl questions, eventually landing on QB Reader as my go-to source. I chose to focus on middle school and easy high school level questions to make QuickQ accessible to a wide range of players.
As QuickQ started gaining traction, I realized a critical issue was brewing. Players who hadn't refreshed their browser in a while were running out of questions! This wasn't the seamless, daily trivia experience I envisioned. It was time to level up QuickQ's infrastructure.
Initially, I included the trivia questions directly within the website's code. This meant players had to reload the site to get new questions, and sometimes they'd even run out! To solve this, I created a dedicated server to store and deliver the questions. Essentially, I set up a virtual server on Amazon's cloud platform to handle the growing demand for QuickQ trivia.
With the new QuickQ server in place, players no longer have to worry about refreshing the page. Fresh trivia questions are now delivered seamlessly every day, ensuring an uninterrupted QuickQ experience. This is just the first step in scaling QuickQ to handle even more trivia enthusiasts.
When deciding which framework to use for QuickQ, I fell back to what I knew best: React. Luckily Create React App makes spinning up a single page app effortless, and it's easy to deploy too. I didn't have a backend, so I pulled some old quiz bowl questions from the Protobowl GitHub and stuck them in a JSON file. The UI was very minimal: A start button which would Start showing the questions one character at a time along with a Buzz button to press when you knew the answer. I read through some AWS tutorials and found how easy it was to register a domain with Route 53 and host my React app with Amplify.
I had a blast playing quiz bowl in high school. It was low pressure because our team wasn't the best, but I loved learning new things, competing, and hitting the buzzer. After I graduated, I took a break from academic quizzing. However, during the COVID pandemic, some of my old quiz bowl friends and I would hop on Protobowl (an online quiz bowl game) to connect and compete. I was also caught up in the Wordle craze. I played religiously every morning, trying to get a streak of 365 days. Reaching my goal began to feel like a chore because of simplicity of the game. I stopped feeling challenged, so after I got my one-year streak I retired from the game. I resolved to create a daily game in the spirit of Wordle with more variation and challenge. That is how I created QuickQ. One of the best things about Wordle is its speed. It can usually be finished in under 5 minutes. Trivia is interesting, but if you don't know an answer it can feel hopeless or take you forever. That is why QuickQ has a 90 second timer with questions that get easier the longer you wait. It also has questions from 8 different categories each day to allow for a broad range of learning and expertise.
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