Quiz Creation Challenge #01: It Came From Outer Space!

Run out of inspiration for cool, new quizzes? Want marginally increased traffic on your wonderful creations? Worry no longer, for the Quiz Creation Challenge is here!

The premise is simple: I give you a topic for a quiz, and then you create a quiz based around said topic. After a while, I'll play your quizzes and pick my favourite ones. The winners and their quizzes will be posted on my JetPunk blog for all to see.

So for this challenge, you'll need to create a quiz based around: Space! (which you may have already guessed if you read the title). The quiz could be about our stars and planets, or it could be about a work of fiction that has a heavy focus on space. Let your creativity run wild!

One thing that is SUPER DUPER IMPORTANT for participants is to include #QCCSpace somewhere in the title of your quiz. Additionally, you can put the URL to your quiz in the comments section of this post. It helps ensure that I find your quiz and is actually included in the contest.

The deadline for this contest is July 18th (two weeks after this post goes live), after which I will post the results... sometime after the submission period ends. I’d like to give my thoughts on some of the submissions so depending on how many people participate it might take longer or shorter than you'd expect. The winner won't receive anything beyond a nomination, but I hope that everyone participating has fun challenging themselves regardless!

One last thing... spread the word! A contest is no fun if it's just one or two people. I would like to see as many people participating as possible for a wide variety of quizzes!

Good luck, have fun, and may the best quiz maker win!

Of course, it’s actually way past the deadline for quiz submissions, and that can only mean one thing: it’s time to reveal the winners! But before I do that, I just want to stress that this is less of a contest and more of a challenge. If your quiz isn’t one of the ‘winners’, please don’t let your takeaway from this be “man, I suck at making quizzes.” There was no quiz submitted that I didn’t enjoy taking. The winner’s list is meant to give a shout-out to the quizzes that stood out to me. Try to take inspiration from others, regardless of your placement.

Oh, and be nice to everyone :)

Random Solar System Trivia by KingEureka

Technically the first submission for the QCC, as the creator had initially submitted a series of quizzes about several planets. However, none of the quizzes were actually made FOR the QCC, so the series wasn’t in the running even if they were all very good. But then they made a new quiz, that WAS made for the QCC, so it is in the running.

With a total of 125 high-quality questions randomly picked every time, it’s every space lover’s dream! Granted, some of those questions are reused from the original series, but I’m pretty sure most are new. While the new questions could probably hold up a quiz on their own, the old ones just bring it to the next level. Not to mention, I just really enjoy random quizzes. I have a bad habit whenever I try to get 100% on a regular quiz, I’ll pay more attention to the location of the answer than the question it’s tied to. But on a random quiz I can’t do that, so I end up learning more on a random quiz than on any other type of quiz and if a quiz actually makes me learn something, that’s a plus in my book.

My only problem with the quiz is that some questions rely on the context given by the previous question in order to make sense. On a regular quiz, this would be fine, but this is a random quiz. All of the questions are jumbled up, so there is no way to guarantee that two questions will be in the correct order everytime. In other words all context for a question needs to be given within the question itself. I know for sure that a few questions like this have been fixed, so if you haven’t already done so I’d just take a look and make sure that this problem is fixed for every question.

Overall, very good quiz! I often find myself coming back to this one.

Groups of Things - Moons by BotswanaEmperor

I’m sure that most of us have taken a groups of things quiz before (or at least understand the concept of it) and this quiz does an excellent job of taking that concept and stretching it as far as it can go. Based on the title of the quiz, one might expect to have answer with various moons. But there’s a lot to this quiz than just that. You’ll be naming the various countries that’ve landed on the moon, the first people to walk on the moon, and the different phases of the moon on top of the expected questions.

There were a few groups that I thought were weird. One being "Biggest Moons." What's the cutoff for biggest moon? Is it just the top 10? You could reword the group to be "Moons Bigger than X" or "10 Biggest Moons," that way it feels more like an actual group. Another being "Moons of Mars," which is kind of a random pick for a planet. This isn't a major problem, but I'm interested in hearing why you chose Mars specifically given that there are many other planets with moons.

It's true! Many planets do have moon(s)!

And... that’s it! This quiz is very simple, but sometimes simple is best. It’s still very good and is lots of fun. Nice job :)

Musical Acts by Songs with Space-Related Titles by FlabberBapper

This is the true first QCC submission. You'll have to name various singers and bands based on a song they made, BUT each song has something related to space in the title. This could be moons, the sun, stars, rockets, moons, stars... did I mention that there are songs related to moons and stars?

That's my only complaint. A lot of the songs chosen feel kind of samey due to the fact they share key words with the other songs. While they're probably less common, I can't imagine it would be too hard to find a song with a word like galaxy, universe, or comet in the title. But what this quiz lacks in song title variety it makes up for in song genre variety. I think. I haven't listened to every song in this quiz, but the ones I have listened to could not be more different from each other. And this creates an interesting question for this quiz. Should genre variety be more important, or title variety? The correct answer is actually to find a balance between the two, as one ensures that pretty much anybody will get one and the other keeps it more engaging for those who know all. It's hard, and is something that I've had similar troubles in making my own quizzes, but if you can pull it off successfully then your quiz will have ascended.

My favourite aspect of this quiz is the fact that it pushes the limit on what a 'space quiz' can be. The space theming is definitely there, but it tests your music knowledge more than your space knowledge. There really isn't any other quiz submitted that replicates this, so FlabberBapper definitely stands out among the other participants. I was actually surprised there were 0 quizzes about Star Wars, or Star Trek, or any other fictional space franchises.

So congrats to the winners! The quizzes aren't in any particular order, but they are the ones I enjoyed the most. But I did enjoy every quiz submitted, so...

• The Solar System (Quiz Series)
• Alien Invasion
• Name a Valid - Outer Space Edition
• If planets were countries
• Space by Clue
• Every Government Space Agency in the World

...here is a list of all the other quizzes submitted! You can't really go wrong with taking any of these quizzes, but the three I chose are definitely must-plays (in my opinion, at least).

Thanks everybody for participating! See you next time!