Playful or Focused: Matching a Quiz's Look to Your Students

A quiz that delights a second grader can make a tenth grader roll their eyes. Bouncing buttons, big rounded tiles and a shower of confetti feel like a party at seven, and like a toy at sixteen. Most quiz tools give you one look and leave the age fit to chance, so teachers of older students end up apologizing for the graphics before the first question.

Kwizzy has two looks, and the quiz owner picks one per quiz. This post covers what each one changes, how to choose, and the places where students see your choice, so you are not surprised when a game starts on the projector.

What the two styles change

The style is a set of visual settings applied across the whole play experience. It changes how the quiz looks and moves, not what it asks or how it scores. The same questions, timers, points and explanations appear in both.

Playful is bright and rounded. It uses big type, large corner radii on the answer tiles, bouncy motion and the full amount of confetti when someone gets a question right. It is meant for younger students.

Focused is calmer. The colors are restrained, the corners are tighter, the type is a little smaller, motion is quick and small, and confetti is kept to a light sprinkle. It is meant for older students.

Two things stay the same in both. Every answer tile carries its own letter and its own icon, as well as its color, so a student who cannot tell two colors apart can still tell the tiles apart and a teacher can say "pick C" out loud. And the animation respects the setting some people turn on in their device to reduce motion, so a student who has asked their phone for less movement gets less movement, in either style.

Where your choice shows up

The style belongs to the quiz, and students cannot change it. You choose it when you create or edit a quiz, in a "Look & feel" box with a small preview drawn from the real settings, so what you see there is what they will get.

From there it follows the quiz wherever it is played:

• Live games, on each student's phone.
• The projector view, where a live game adds its own layer on top of the style: larger type that scales with the screen, a flat background and thick borders, so the room can read it from the back. The big-screen page is covered in our post on the Big Screen view.
• Homework. When you assign a quiz, the assignment takes a copy of the quiz, and the style comes with it. If you change the quiz's style afterward, an assignment already set keeps the look it started with.
• Solo play, where a student works through a quiz alone on their own device.

How to choose

Age is the main guide, and the two descriptions above are written with it in mind. The library follows the same idea: library quizzes for the elementary level start playful, and the ones for middle school and up start focused. You can use that as a rule of thumb for your own quizzes.

A few cases where a rule of thumb is not enough:

• Mixed ages or a range of readers. If a class has a wide range, the playful style's bigger type can help the students who struggle to read, even if the confetti feels young to others. Pick for the students who need the most support.
• Test review for older students. Focused fits well. A high school class reviewing for an exam generally wants the questions to be the center of attention, and the calmer look keeps it there. The library quiz Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration is a good example of content that suits it.
• Early elementary. Playful suits quick fact practice like Addition and Subtraction Facts, where short rounds and celebration keep little ones going.
• Students who find motion distracting. Focused is the safer pick for those students, because its motion is smaller and quicker. Remember that you cannot set it per student, so choose for the group.

What not to do: do not use the style as a way to make a hard quiz feel easier, or a dull quiz feel exciting. A style is a wrapper. A confusing question is just as confusing with confetti.

Changing your mind

Switching a quiz between the two styles is a single choice in the editor, so it is cheap to try one and change it. A reasonable approach is to run one live game, watch the room, and switch if the look is working against you.

Keep in mind that homework copies the quiz when you set it, so make the change before you assign, not after.

Making quizzes your own

The library quizzes arrive with a sensible style already chosen, but the choice becomes yours once you write your own questions. If you want to build quizzes for a particular grade, with the look to match, it is worth a look at the pricing page to see what each plan includes.