Zoom quizzes were all the rage last year when the first lockdown came into effect. I took part in them on a weekly basis with my friends from University, including hosting one myself. The quizzes gradually phased out once people were able to get out and about more, so we haven’t had one for a while.
Many of us are now facing the prospect of being in lockdown again during the coming weeks. With the days getting shorter and colder, ’tis the season for cosy evenings indoors. Therefore, I predict a rise in the Zoom quiz trend again!
When it was my turn to host a Zoom quiz last year, I noted down as many quiz round ideas as I could think of. I will be sharing these ideas with you now.
Related post: My 7 Positives of Lockdown
14 Quiz Round Ideas for your Zoom Quiz
First off, I recommend making a PowerPoint presentation to accompany your Zoom quiz. You can share your screen so that the participants can see it. This is much easier than printing out and showing them pictures for the picture rounds, and it also means that participants can read the questions on the screen. This means you won’t have to keep repeating questions if they encounter any problems with their audio or internet connection.
1. Close-up Photos of Objects
Go around your house and take really close-up photos of household objects. Choose the angle so that they are hard to identify. For example, the ‘grating part’ of a cheese grater, the sole of a shoe, one hole of a plug socket…
2. Restaurant Menus
Look online to find the menus of some well-known chain restaurants or fast-food outlets. Take screenshots of a part of the menu (make sure the restaurant name is not mentioned anywhere) and get participants to identify what restaurant that menu is from. Alternatively, you tell them a characteristic starter, main course, dessert and drink from that restaurant, and they have to work it out from that. This could be made as easy or difficult as you want!
3. Celebrity Photos with a Filter on
On a smartphone, it’s quite easy to download a celebrity photo and apply a funny filter to it. There are plenty of free apps with a lot of filters to choose from. Use filters to make some celebrities look funny and less recognisable, and get your quiz participants to guess who they are!
4. Anagrams
Think of several words in the same category, for example, fruits and vegetables, animals or celebrities, and mix up the letters to make anagrams. Give the quiz participants a set amount of time (such as 3 minutes) to unscramble as many anagrams as they can. That will be their score for the round.
5. Famous Cats and Dogs
This is an idea for a picture round. Find pictures of famous cats and dogs (real and fictional) and get the participants to identify them. Examples include Bagpuss, Snoopy and Lassie, and I’m sure you can come up with some more challenging examples too!
6. Voice Clips
Find clips of celebrities talking, and see if your quiz participants can recognise them by their voice alone. You could even speed up or slow down the clips to make it harder (think chipmunk effect).
7. Famous Landmarks on Google Maps
I used this idea in my Zoom quiz and it was a favourite amongst the participants. Go on Google Maps and search for famous landmarks. Take a screenshot of each landmark as a birds-eye-view. This unique perspective can make landmarks harder to identify because they look different and less recognisable from above!
8. Inside Chocolate Bars
The Sun advertised a quiz where you have to identify 20 different chocolate bars from their cross-section. My friend used this in her quiz and it was fun but surprisingly difficult! You could either use the ready-made quiz or make your own by buying several chocolate bars, cutting them in half and taking photos of the insides (or showing them live on-screen). You could even get creative by doing a similar thing with biscuits, cakes or (whole) crisps instead. The bonus is, you get to eat them afterwards!
9. Obscure Animals
Find some photos of obscure animals that not many people will have heard of. Show the participants the photos and the names of the animals, scrambled up, and get them to try and match the right name to the right animal.
10. Animal Sounds
Find some recordings of animal sounds and get your participants to guess what kind of animal made that sound. If you want, you can choose obscure animals again and get them to match the sound to the name or photo, or have this as a third element of the obscure animals round.
11. Well-Known Songs Played Backwards
If you can find snippets of well-known songs, you can reverse them in a free music software program such as Audacity. You may even be able to find some clips that are already reversed. For my quiz, I reversed some clips of Disney songs and got my friends to identify them. They found it surprisingly difficult! I definitely recommend using well-known songs for this round because they sound very different when reversed.
12. Songs Sped Up or Slowed Down
You can use free music software like Audacity to speed up or slow down clips of songs. Alternatively, you might find some already made on YouTube or elsewhere. Get your participants to identify the songs.
13. Colours round
This is a standard quiz round, but the answer to every question is a colour. You can find questions online, in a quiz book, or think of your own. Some examples are: What colour is Leicester Square on a Monopoly Board? and What colour is the left-most ring of the Olympic flag?
14. Emoji Sentences
Spell out sentences using only emojis and see if your participants can work them out. It’s best if you have a theme, such as film titles, song titles or sayings. For example, 🐓🏃🏾♀️ would be ‘Chicken Run’!
Tiebreaker Question
In one of my friend’s Zoom quizzes, there was a tie for first place. My friend had to quickly look up a tiebreaker question to determine the winner. If you are hosting a Zoom quiz, it is a good idea to have a tiebreaker question chosen in advance so that you are prepared in the case of a tie.
I hope you enjoyed these Zoom quiz round ideas!
If you were looking for Zoom quiz round ideas, I hope you have found some ideas that appeal to you. If you were just reading this post for fun, maybe I have inspired you to create and host your own Zoom quiz? Let me know in the comments if so!
For even more quiz round ideas, check out my other post: 11 Fun and Creative Quiz Round Ideas for Your Zoom Quiz
Have you hosted or taken part in a Zoom quiz this year? What quiz rounds did you make?
LOL! I am definitely not cool at all. I didn’t know that Zoom Quizzes were a thing. I love the idea. Thanks for the post. My favorite’s are “emoji sentences”, “favorite landmarks” and “restaurant menus”. Do you have any ones that you might create for the holidays?! That sounds like a great post idea! “Zoom Quizzes: Holiday Edition”, great for family and friends 🙂
Lol, I’m glad to have introduced you to the idea of Zoom quizzes! I love the idea of a ‘Zoom Quizzes: Holiday Edition’, I will have a think about that! The music-related rounds could be adapted to Christmas songs.
This sounds like so much fun! Zoom quizzes didn’t take off here in the same way. The big thing in my area was live video bingo hosted by the different small businesses and direct salespeople. You would pay a certain amount per card to get in on the game, and then a portion of the money was put into a pool that made up the prizes, which could then be used to purchase from the host. I won over $100 in credit to spend from one of my favourite tea businesses, so I was ALL over that! lol
Maybe Zoom quizzes were mostly a UK thing! I haven’t heard of video bingo so I don’t think they do it here, but it sounds like a fun idea and that’s so cool that you won so much credit to spend!
Great ideas! Never heard about Zoom Quiz but it’s such a good way to keep in touch with people and fight loneliness!!
Thank you! It’s definitely a fun way to keep in touch and have some laughter.
Some great ideas! We do a zoom quiz in the village where we live and about 20 households take part it’s really fun xx
Oh that sounds like so much fun, especially with so many households taking part!
This post is going to be sooo good for the next few weeks. My fiance and I won every single quiz we took part in last lockdown!
Rosie
Congratulations on winning every single quiz you took part in! I admit I didn’t win any!
I feel out of the loop because I’ve never even heard of a zoom quiz, but this seems really fascinating. Thanks for enlightening me a little bit. Lol
From the comments, I’ve learned that Zoom quizzes seem to be more of a UK thing, as lots of US people haven’t heard of them! I’m glad to have introduced you to the idea! 😄
Gosh, I haven’t done one of these but they all sound like such fun ideas! I feel like they would all make for very good drinking games haha 😉
That’s so true, they would make great drinking games, haha!
Zoom quizzes have already returned to my family hahaha! Yesterday we had a round which had a ‘Did Trump Tweet It Round’ which was hilarious. Anagrams are my favourite too x
Hahahaha, I can imagine that was hilarious! xx
I love these ideas! Definitely going to share with my teacher friends!
Thank you! I hope your teacher friends find it helpful!
Here’s a quiz idea! Is it a Simpsons episode or a Craft Beer? It’s funny!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JfYJYuJyoc&t=4s
I don’t know much about The Simpsons or Craft Beer, so I would do badly in that quiz, but it’s funny!
You could also have a quick fire language round of questions as well. Your zoom quiz night ideas are truly useful thank you so much. The quick fire question round on language could consist of ten or fifteen phrases that are taken from a dictionary in that particular language. You could have a fill in the blank round or a picture round too. Alternatively you could do a guess the word round.
I’m so glad that you found my ideas useful! Thank you for your suggestions too – those are great ideas and I’d definitely consider them for a future quiz!