Make learning fun with a quiz: five ideas for World Teachers' Day

World Teachers' Day falls on 5 October, and the best thing about the job is still the moment a class leans in. A quiz gets you there faster than almost anything else, because a question with four answers and a timer is a small game, and a class that is playing is a class that is learning. Here are five ways to make learning fun with a quiz, each with a prompt you can paste into the Quiz.ai composer and three that come as finished quizzes you can open right now.

1. Start the lesson with a race

Ten questions, everyone on their phones, a code on the board and a leaderboard nobody can see until the reveal. A live game at the start of a lesson wakes the room up and shows you in two minutes what stuck from last week. Keep it quick, keep it about last lesson, and let the speed scoring do the motivating.

Prompt: Make a 10-question retrieval quiz for Year 6 on fractions, decimals and percentages from last week: equivalent fractions, ordering fractions and finding fractions of amounts. Put it at a funfair, with fraction bars for the ride queues and number lines for the ride timers.

Here is that quiz, ready to host live:

2. Put the topic inside a story

A cell is a factory, a leaf is a kitchen, place value is a treasure map. The maths and the science do not change; the story gives pupils a reason to care about the next question and a picture to hang the idea on. Ask the assistant for the world you want and it will keep every question inside it.

Prompt: Create an 8-question quiz for Year 7 on photosynthesis, told as the story of a plant's kitchen: the ingredients it takes in, the energy it cooks with and what comes out. Include the word equation as a picture with one part missing.

The plant's kitchen, ready to play:

3. Let them quiz themselves

Some of the best learning happens with nobody watching. Every quiz has a practice mode where pupils work through the questions alone with the answers hidden until they check. Set it as homework, use it for early finishers, or give it to a pupil who missed the lesson. Nobody is racing anybody; they are just finding out what they know.

Prompt: Write a 10-question quiz for Year 4 on place value up to 10,000: the value of each digit, partitioning, ordering and rounding to the nearest hundred. Make it a treasure hunt, with place-value charts showing the clues.

The treasure hunt, for practice or as a diagnostic at the start of the topic:

4. Turn revision into flashcards

The week before a test, a quiz becomes a deck. Flashcards show the question on the front and the answer on the back, and pupils flip through them at their own pace. The same questions you played live in September are the cards they revise from in December, so nothing is written twice.

Prompt: Make a 20-question revision quiz on the causes of the First World War for Year 9, with a one-sentence explanation on every question so the flashcards teach as well as test.

5. Let the class write the next one

Ask each table for two questions on the topic, collect them, and paste them into the assistant: "Turn these into a quiz and fix any wrong answers." Pupils will argue about their own distractors, which is exactly the argument you want them to have. Play the result next lesson and give the winning table the credit.

Prompt: Here are twelve questions written by my Year 8 class on the water cycle. Turn them into a quiz with four choices each, correct any facts that are wrong, and keep the pupils' wording where you can.

Running it in class

• Live game. Open a quiz, choose Live, and let the class join with the code on the board.
• Assignment. Choose Assignment to send a link. Every attempt is marked and you get results per pupil.
• Pen & Paper. Print the worksheet with the answer key on a separate page.
• Practice and flashcards. Pupils can practise on their own or flip through the cards.

Happy World Teachers' Day. We make learning fun with a quiz, and so do you.