My quiz program offers the following functionality:

1. To take a public quiz.
   A public quiz is a quiz which the quiz setter has opened up to the general public. You take the quiz on your own and you mark your own answers. You can only take the quiz once but you can take breaks between rounds of the quiz. When you restart it will start at the next round for you. When you complete the quiz you are given a final score and told how your score ranks against all the people who have previously taken the quiz. A table of the top ten scores is given. You choose the name by which you want to be known.
2. To take a restricted quiz.
   A restricted quiz is one which the quiz setter has deemed not to be public. Here you need to know the username and password for the quiz. You take the quiz on your own and you mark your own answers. You can only take the quiz once but you can take breaks between rounds of the quiz. When you restart it will start at the next round for you. When you complete the quiz you are given a final score and told how your score ranks against all the people who have previously taken the quiz. A table of the top ten scores is given. You choose the name by which you want to be known.
3. Take part in a multi-player online quiz.
   Such a quiz is run by a quiz-master. The quiz-master will involve you in a zoom call or WhatsApp group call. The call is just for communication at the time of the quiz. Once you arrive on the call, the quiz master will ask you for an email address and a team name. The quiz-master will register you. The registration process sends an email to you from ‘CCCGAMES’. This email will probably go to your spam/junk folder. You open this email and click the link within it. This puts you into a waiting state, until all the players have been registered and until the quiz starts. When ready the quiz-master starts the quiz and the questions for the first round automatically appear in your quiz browser window. A timer at the top of the page shows the time remaining. You answer the questions by typing in the spaces provided or, in the case of multi-choice questions, by choosing from the drop-down list. When the time runs out, the questions disappear. If the questions were multi-choice the computer automatically marks your answers. Otherwise, your answers are passed to another player to mark and you receive answers from another player to mark. This is in the form of a table with 3 columns and a row for each question. The first column contains the correct answer for the question; the second column contains the answer supplied by the other player. The third column is where you mark the answer. Click ‘Right’ if the answer is correct and ‘Wrong’ otherwise. Once you have marked all the questions click the ‘RECORD RESULTS’ button at the bottom of the table. In between rounds a table of the quiz scores are displayed.
4. The ability to act as quiz-master and give online quizzes
   to people such as your wider family, friends, work colleagues or local group members. You can do this with any of the public quizes. The quiz-master clicks the link: 'Setup a Family & Friends Quiz Event'. Through this link, they select the quiz to use, provide names and email addresses for the teams taking part, prior to launching the quiz.
5. The ability to set a quiz.
   QuizPlayer provides a set of templates to build quiz rounds. These include questions based on: text, pictures, sound, video, observation and spot the difference. The key to constructing an interesting quiz is in gathering the appropriate multimedia resources and then placing them in the templates provided. Below I give an outline of how this can be done.

Seting a quiz
If you are just going to use text questions and text answers then just go to the setup quiz page and exclisively use the 'Textual questions with textual answers' question type.

However, if you want to make your quiz more interesting through the use of: pictures, sound and video then you may need tools to gather these resources. Here I will give examples of the tools I have used. All of these are free and as far as I am aware virus free.

Pictures:
These of course can come from a variety of sources. In addition I use the 'prt sc' button on my laptop. Just get the image on your laptop, press 'prt sc' key which copies your screen to the copy buffer and the paste the image (Ctrl V) into a program like 'paint' where you can crop the image and save it to a file.

Sound:
To capture sound I have used the SoundTap program. It is free to down load and simple to use. It is free for a trial period, if you want to use it after the trial there is a small payment. Play the sound you want to record on your computer and just press 'start record' and 'stop record' on SoundTap around the sound sequence you want to capture.

Video:
To capture video I use a screen recording program. The one I use is Debut Professional. Again this is offered with a trial period. It is a bit more involved than capturing sound as you need to select the portion of the screen you want to record. With a few minutes of experimenting I was successful in recording what I needed. Debut Professional can also be used to record audio, but since I had previously purchased Sound Tap, I continue to use that.

Having collected the resources i need for my quiz I now go to the setup quiz page.

Here you can build a quiz:

• You will need to authenticate yourself through your email address
• Choose a quiz name
• Add the rounds to your quiz

To add a round to your quiz:

• Choose a round type (these are the different question templates)
• Give the round a name
• Specify the time you want your contestants to have to answer that round
• supply the questions and answers. Where required, depending on question type you are prompted to upload the picture, sound or video file from your laptop via the normal 'choose a file' interface.

When time permits I will add more functionality around editing existing rounds.

Problems you may encounter and some solutions:

1. Your email host blocks emails from QUIZPLAYER. This often happens with work email addresses. Sometimes a problem occurs because your email server does not deliver email in a reasonable time (one or two minutes). To overcome this problem you can register for web mail (with gmail.com or outlook.com) and use this just when doing online quizzes.
2. Your email client does not allow you to click the link in your browser. You can cut and paste the link address into the address bar of a browser.
3. The sound or video files do not play on your computer. Quizplayer uses ‘wav’ sound files and mp4 video files. Most computers support both these file formats. If you are getting no sound from the sound files first make sure that sound is turned on (not muted) and the volume is turned up. If this works and you get sound from some other program, then probably you need to find a wav player for your device. Try googling and then download it. If videos are not playing you need to download an mp4 player. Hopefully you should be able to find a free wav and mp4 player.
4. If you have any other problem and it is reproducible please email me and I will try and sort it out.

Motivation for writing the software:

1. My contribution to helping maintain social cohesion over this unprecedented period that Covid 19 has presented us with. It has helped me to maintain wider family and friend contacts.

Please enjoy and keep safe, I hope my quiz will give more opportunity for people to keep in contact with their family and friends over these difficult times.

Enjoy