Creating a quiz is a great way of engaging students and fostering gentle competition. It's also a lot of fun for everyone involved. The problem is that there are a huge number of resources available which can be quite overwhelming. So to help you get started we'll give you a list of tools that actually work.
To create this article we spoke to teachers and got their feedback, so you can be sure that this is based on real experience.
Steps to creating a maths quiz
Basically there are three steps to creating a good online maths quiz:
- Source some questions or puzzles
- Put the questions into a form so that they can be answered online
- Make the results available
Let's go through these steps one by one.
How to find maths puzzles and questions
Obviously the choice of questions for your quiz will have the biggest impact on how successful it is. You could certainly take the route of creating your own questions, which makes sense if you want to cover a very particular topic that does not have much material online.
If this is not a constraint, then finding "ready-made" questions and/or puzzles online is quicker and easier.
Here are some sites that we like:
👉 Mathsisfun.com
This site has a good section on number puzzles but also has a lot of other things like worksheets, explanations, activities and games.
Here's an example of a number puzzle that would be suitable for a quiz.
What is the missing number in Triangle Four?
Naturally the answers are included too! In this case the answer is 45-16 = 29 (The product of the two largest minus the square of the smallest)
👉 Commoncoresheets.com
This site provides math worksheets for just about any area of study. You can use the questions and puzzles from the worksheets in your quiz. The site is completely free.
👉 Mathsbot.com
This site provides tools for math teachers, including bell-ringers and drills, math tools and manipulatives, question generators, printables, and puzzles. Perfect for finding quiz material!
👉 Chatgpt.com
ChatCPT is very proficient at posing maths questions. It is not very good at answering them, however! So caution is advised.
How to put quiz questions into a form
Once you have compiled a suitable list of questions, it's time to put them in a form tool.
There are a number of free and high-quality form tools available -- they all work in a broadly similar fashion:
- Create a series of questions with empty fields for the answers. You can choose from several formats for the answers including multiple choice and text fields.
- Provide a link to your quiz that you can share with your students.
- Your students can take the quiz (online obviously) and once they are done you'll get an email.
- Afterwards you can use the form tool to aggregate the results.
Here are three form tools we can recommend.
All of these are free but do require a user account. Note that participants in the quiz do not require a login or user account.
How to make the quiz results available online
A quiz leaderboard from Keepthescore.com
Once everyone has completed the quiz it's time to let them know how they did. Again, there are any number of options for how to proceed.
The simplest way is to simply tell everyone by reading from a list of scores. Maybe that's enough for you, but possibly not, especially if your class is online.
Your second option would be to put the scores into a spreadsheet and publish it. Here's an explanation for how to create a leaderboard using Google Sheets .
The third option is you use a fancy online scoreboard tool like Keepthescore.com. This will allow you to create a mobile-friendly leaderboard with extra features like:
- Upload profile pictures for each student
- Publish a link to social media
- Cool animations when the scores are updated
- and much more
Why not give it a go?
There are also any number of other options and themes available.
A halloween-themed leaderboard
Extra ideas
If you want some variation, you could try the following ideas:
- You could put a time limit on the quiz, the shorter the harder
- Have a live quiz in the classroom whilst making use of an animated leaderboard (see above)
- Get the students to make their own quizzes
That's all for now, but please let us know if you have feedback in the comments below. Bye 👋.
