Building Classroom Culture with Pear Deck Trivia

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, a few members of the Pear Deck team decided a moment to pause and bond was needed. Building a strong culture is essential and, faced with the challenge of physical separation at the time, we knew we had to get creative.

Our design team created a simple templated Deck — made to be delivered over a video conference — with rounds focused on a variety of topics from pop culture to history to surprising facts about various Pear Deck team members. And with that, Quarantrivia was born!

This brief game became something to look forward to, a step toward rebuilding the connected culture we took for granted when physical proximity came so easily. We decided to share these templates and best practices in the hopes it will bring your class, school community, friends or family a bit of connection and joy as well.

Building a trivia Deck for your class is simple. We’ve included a few sample questions using different Pear Deck question types to give you a starting point.

How to build a trivia deck for your class

Use a Text response type for an easier question, or one with multiple parts.

For questions that might be more difficult to guess without a set of options, consider a Multiple Choice slide.

Drawing can be a fun way to get students engaged. You can also have students connect answers with lines, circle correct options, or label images.

Draggable slides can be used for labeling part of a map or image, getting true/false responses, and many other questions.

Here are some best practices we learned through our games:

• Elect a moderator to conduct the Trivia game and keep score
• Establish rules ahead of starting the game
• No searching for answers in a separate tab
• Be respectful of other players
• Decide in advance if you would like players to compete individually, in pairs, or on teams
• Be sure pairs or teams are able to communicate, whether it’s in Zoom breakout rooms, a group Slack message, or another method that works for you
• Each team should elect (or be assigned) a captain who can submit their group’s responses.
• Have fun!

Preview & copy the templates here