Speed Quizzing Brings The Humble Pub Quiz Into The 21st Century

I don’t know about our friends “over the pond” in the US, but over here in the UK we like nothing more than meeting a group of our buddies for a few beers and a good old pub quiz. But a new service dubbed Speed Quizzing is set to take the humble pub quiz by storm.

What is Speed Quizzing?

Anyone who’s ever attended a pub quiz will know the drill, you pay your couple of pound and in return you get your badly photocopied piece of paper with a handful of fuzzy black and white photo’s for “guess the celebrity”; then another 50 of so spaces to fill in your various answers. At the end of the quiz all the scores are tallied up and the winning team get a prize.

Speed Quizzing is completely different, here the whole quiz is run from the quiz masters laptop and you take part using a free app from the Apple App Store, or Android Market. Once you have the app installed the quiz master will go through each question and your team interactively answer via a nominated phone. The beauty of Speed Quizzing is that the answers are given on the fly so this breeds competition (and fun) along the way.

How do I start Speed Quizzing?

They have a free Windows application that you can download to run your own quizzes. Once downloaded you can try a demo version and if you like Speed Quizzing, get an activation code to start running your own quiz.

As a participant you can find a list of Speed Quizzing events that are taking place on the Speed Quizzing website. Looking at the events list, I actually found a regular Speed Quizzing host that’s around 5 minutes from my parents house – always a bonus!

I personally think that this is a great way to bring the humble pub quiz into the 21 century, and also help to stop the inevitable cheating that goes on with modern smartphones (you get a limited time to answer).

But what do you guys think? As my fellow RefuGeeks, would you consider attending a Speed Quizzing quiz over a traditional quiz? I know I would.