Quiz Master — 400 questions, ten categories, and a clock you can change mid-game
Ten categories — Geography, History, Science, Technology, Sports, Music, Movies, Literature, Logic and Random — each holding eight series of questions, four hundred in total. Teams pick a category, the question appears, and the answer clock runs. Miss it and the other team can steal. The default answer time is seven seconds, which is short on purpose, and it can be changed to 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 or no limit at all — from the setup screen or from the hamburger menu in the middle of a round.
Seven seconds is a teaching decision, not a difficulty setting
A short clock stops the thing that kills quiz activities: one confident student thinking aloud for forty seconds while everyone else waits. With seven seconds the team has to decide together, fast, which forces short negotiations — no, it's the other one, are you sure? — and keeps every player in the round. Raise it when you want considered answers, drop it back when the room goes flat.
Change the clock without stopping the game
The time control is reachable from the menu mid-session, and that matters more than it sounds. You rarely know the right setting in advance: a mixed group might need twenty seconds for the first series and seven by the fourth, once they have found their rhythm. Being able to adjust without restarting means you can tune the pressure to the room in real time rather than committing at setup.
Eight series means the deck outlasts the term
Each category carries eight separate series, so a class can play the same category weekly without meeting a repeated question. There is also a control to set every category to the same series at once, which is how you keep two teams on identical footing — useful when one group has played more than the other and you want a fair contest rather than a memory test.
The English is in the argument, not the answer
A correct answer is one word and teaches nothing. The value sits in the ten seconds before it and the ten seconds after. Require that teams confer aloud in English, and after each reveal ask one team to say why they chose what they chose. That single habit converts a trivia game into a speaking activity, and it is the difference between a fun filler and a lesson.
Where the steal rule earns its keep
Handing a missed question to the other team means nobody switches off while the opposition is answering — everyone is working on every question. It also gives a weaker team a route back into a game they are losing, which keeps them playing. If a team is far behind, quietly give them the categories they are strongest in rather than adjusting the scores.
Level and format
A2 upward depending on category — Logic and Random travel furthest down the levels, Literature and History demand the most. Works on one projected screen for a whole class in teams, or on a single device passed between two players. Ten minutes as a filler, forty as a full session. Keep the answer key open on your own screen and do not read it before the teams have committed.
Goes well with
Further reading
Smartboard Games in ESL — what the big screen is good for
Gamification in Language Learning — why scoring changes behaviour