I have a few weeks to put together a Jeopardy game that I will Trebek for a group of around 30 people. I have my categories and most of my [del]questions[/del] answers, but I need some help on the software end.
Should I use PowerPoint? Is there a better alternative?
If I use PP, am I just going to ‘manually’ skip around from slide (answer) to slide (question)? Is there a way to do this so it doesn’t look clunky?
The game will be projected onto a large screen.
Also, I believe there is a way for the presenter to see the snapshots of all the slides along the left margin while presenting only the selected slide to the group, no?
With PowerPoint, how would you ensure that answers which have already been seen are removed from the game board? I don’t know if it’s possible to do this easily.
On the other hand this should be no problem to do in HTML+CSS, so if you have some web page coding skills then that’s an option. For the main game board, make a page with a 6×6 table, with each of the dollar amounts a hyperlink to an answer page. When someone selects an answer, you as the presenter can simply follow the link with your pointing device. The answer page itself will be a hyperlink back to the game board, so once you’re done with the answer just follow the link. The link from the answer board can be made to automatically disappear if you set the CSS style for visited links to “display: none”.
Newer versions of Powerpoint support hyperlinks that can skip straight to other slides.
So you could actually set up a master board with each box on the board hyper linked to a question slide which would work with the random selection process of the contestants.
Blanking out the used boxes on the master board might be harder. Might be easier just to manipulate a background color of the box manually on the main board during the game or, if you’re a slick enough programer you could set up a macro that changed the background color of the selected object (ex: the $400 box) to the same color of the text and make it look like the text disappeared .
I’ve used Powerpoint and hyperlinks in the past to simulate Web page selections and it came off pretty slick.
One caution is to make sure that you are running this on a fast computer as Powerpoint can hog a lot of memory and time depending on how tricked out you make it.
Set up the grid (table) with the categories and dollar amounts with links to each answer’s page. Have the link go to the page with the answer, then the next slide should be the question. On the question’s slide page, have a “home” button that takes you back to the board. As on a Web browser, the hyperlinks can be set to change color when the link has been visited.
You can have a board for single Jeopardy that also includes a link to the Double Jeopardy board, and from there one that goes to the Final Jeopardy category.
Be careful where you click, so you don’t accidentally reveal the next answer. You also need to keep track of the scores manually, AND you have to know when the question is the correct response.
There are some PowerPoint templates for Jeopardy available, including some that use Visual Basic for score keeping. A Google search should find some useful ones (and some dreadful ones).
I have done this for dozens of gatherings over the last decade. I use a PowerPoint in which the “visited” color for hyperlinks is the same as the background on the board. The basic idea has been around for a decade, and is used by lots of schoolteachers. I’ve polished mine into a fairly sophisticated show, with sound effects and graphics. PM me and I’ll happily send you the file.
However, it does not work properly on the most recent version of PowerPoint for Mac (PPTX). There’s a lot of discussion about this on various forums, and a couple of supposed fixes that I have not managed to understand or make work. Perhaps if you’re on a PC it will work properly. For the moment, I just run it on my older laptop.
Can you code? Back in junior high, I made this with VBA inside of Powerpoint, using VBA to handle the logic and Powerpoint to handle the presentation, animations, and sound. It worked very, very well… wish I kept that file around It took only one night to learn and make, but I had a little bit of programming experience.
Seems like somebody else has done the same thing and made it CC-licensed:
I checked out that Powerpoint and it works pretty well. It lets you import questions and answers from an Excel file, and then does all the presentation and such for you. It even keeps score for 3 or 4 teams.
One thing to beware of: It has no error-checking, meaning you can do things like click on a question that’s already been asked (even though it looks gone), double-count a team’s answer as incorrect more than once, etc. But if you click carefully, you should be fine.
Thanks for the links Reply. I had found this subject so intriguing that I was going to tinker with the concept on my computer tonight. Now I can explore the polished results of what appears to be a very cool program.
It took only one night to learn and make, but I had a little bit of programming experience.
Somebody’s bound to find it useful.