Family Trivia Night & Student Film Festival

I hosted my first school trivia night and film festival three years ago, and after running four of these events, I wanted to share some thoughts and advice for anyone interested in replicating the experience.

In a nutshell, school community members (students, their families, and school staff) form trivia teams of up to six people, trivia rounds are punctuated by short student-made movies, and student emcees read the trivia questions and introduce the films.

If you've never been to a trivia night before, it's like a game show where teams compete to answer the most questions correctly. It's a really fun way to invite families and staff to come together and spend time with students, and to showcase student work in the form of their original movies.

The Quick List (detailed discussion below):

• Before the event, craft good-quality trivia questions for your school community, and put them in a presentation.
• Decide what kind of registration system you'll use so you know how many people to expect at the event.
• Reserve a space with seating and tables, sound/visual system set-up, and plan for snacks.
  
• Determine whether you want to offer prizes for trivia and/or film submissions.
  
• Determine movie criteria for inclusion in the event (you may want a judging panel to help), and a submission process and deadline.
  
• Promote the movie submission process and the event registration process widely.
  
• Audition student emcees and prep them for the evening (plan some hospitality items for them, too).
  
• Recruit help from trivia scorers who can score answers quickly and correctly, with your provided answer keys.
  

Enjoy the experience!

The Trivia Questions

Crafting good-quality questions for trivia night is by far the most time-consuming part of the process. You could find existing questions online or use AI to generate some for you, but I preferred to have questions nobody had searched and seen before, with categories that would be a good fit for our community. I wanted to be entirely sure the answer to every question would be true and accurate. It can be tricky to write a question so there is only one correct possible answer and to make the question very clear without being too wordy. It also has to be written so that student emcees can read it successfully. I used open-ended questions rather than multiple choice answers, and I had a good friend from a different school look them over for difficulty and clarity. That was very helpful for revising in advance - you don't want to test your questions in your school community because then some people have an advantage at the event, but you always benefit from another brain to look them over.

It's not much fun to attend a trivia night when you keep getting all the answers wrong, so you don't want questions that are too difficult. It's similarly not fun when questions aren't challenging enough. Knowing your community is really helpful for creating interesting questions. For elementary events, I try to include questions that only younger students are likely to know, and I'll include a few that older staff/parents are likely to know so that everyone on a team has a chance to contribute.

My events used four live trivia categories, with eight to ten questions each, plus a self-paced round. We use paper-based score sheets so that no phones are out or needed - I really like this about the event because it encourages people to stay face to face and talk to each other throughout the evening. Examples of the categories include things like: Games, Famous Monuments, Heroes and Villains, Our School, Alliterative Celebrities (same letter begins the first and last name in each answer), "A" Places (all the answers begin with the letter "A"), Song Lyrics, and Food Around the World.

I also included a self-paced round that teams could work on in between times - and this was generally a puzzle-type round. Once we had Rhyme Time, were clues were written and you had to identify a rhyming answer to match the description (wild snake = hyper viper, for example). Another time we had word scrambles for book titles, or identifying the flags of various countries and organizations.

Presenting the Questions (and answers)

You can use any presentation software you like - Canva or Google Slides, for example - to set up the presentation. I run a library slideshow of events as guests come in, because I'm always looking for ways to teach our community about all the programs and things our library offers. Then I switch to the evening presentation, which includes a welcome slide, an introduction of emcees, and trivia rules. I always include a "Ready?" slide before we start a question round so that I don't accidentally advance too soon.

Since the student emcees are doing the speaking, the presentation acts as a kind of script (although I provide a typed script for them, too). I advance the slides throughout the night and it's a good way to manage the pacing - sometimes the emcees get excited and tend to move too quickly, or get distracted and don't move on. I teach them to wait for my nod before they read the next question. You could add a timer for each question, but I just read the room and leave a little extra time if it seems like tables are still discussing answers, and move on if they seem to be finished. During the event, participants can read each question on the slide and hear it read by the student emcee.

Sample Category Slide - the "Ready?" is a cue that the next slide starts the question round.

After the "Ready" slide (or with it), there is a slide with that question category, and any explanation (if needed). I keep that category name on each subsequent slide, just to make it clear to everyone (if someone walks in late, they could still conceivably jump in).

Sample Question Slide - the category is still visible

It's smart to have the question number on each slide to help participants align it with their answer sheets (I didn't do that in the round pictured above) - but add the question numbers to the presentation at the end. This gives you the flexibility to re-order questions and categories until you finalize the presentation - so if you decide a question is easier, you might want it early on in the category, and a question that is trickier might show up in the middle of the round, or another question might end up being eliminated all together. If you number as you write them, you risk having to re-do all of them every time you make a change.

After each round, emcees collect answer sheets (there's a slide to prompt teams to turn them in) and then we advance to the slide with all the answers so teams know how they did. (More on scoring below).

Sample Answer Slide

A Few More Sample Slides . . .

Scoring the Trivia

After the question slides are written and revised, I create answer sheets with the answers in the exact same format that the participants will have. So if questions 1-4 are in the first column on the answer sheet and questions 5-8 are in the second column, my answer key for judges is written in the same positioning to make it faster and clearer for them.
I also try to anticipate other acceptable answers - abbreviations, first names only - or other cases where someone might offer an answer that should be accepted, and include that in parentheses for the judges on the answer key.

I have an amazing friend who is a trivia night genius, and who was a single scorekeeper for the elementary trivia events. She is quick and accurate and has a good sense for what should be accepted or not, even if I didn't anticipate it for the answer key. But not everyone has a Kristen in their life, so I really think scoring can be better handled by more people in most cases, especially if you have more than eight teams. At my middle school events, I have three amazing staff member volunteers who score trivia, and it is a little less stressful in between rounds because they have more manageable time to check the answers and enter them in the spreadsheet (details on that below).

Important tip: Have designated emcees collect answer sheets for each table, and don't let them wait - have them grab the first one and bring it to the scoring table so judges can start immediately, and then go back for the others. This is especially important if you only have one scorekeeper - they need to start checking off immediately. You can have team representatives bring their answer sheets to you, but then you have people milling around and trying to ask the scorekeepers questions, so it's better to have the emcees act as runners for answer sheet collection. If you decide to have teams input answers electronically, you'll skip this issue.

Super Simple Blank Answer Sheet - embarrassed it's just Arial, but it works

Print enough answer sheets to have four copies per team (or however many rounds you have), plus extras so people who want to join can play at the last minute. This is especially true because some families come to view the student movies without playing trivia, and end up wanting to play trivia, too. If you have a self-paced round, that answer sheet can be the same size as the blank ones, but the clues and answer spaces will be on those sheets - not part of the presentation - so you have to print those separately and be sure there's a copy for each team.

Sample Scoring Google Sheet - team names and actual scores have been changed. Columns have formulas set to automatically add totals once the scorekeepers enter points for each round.

Level Up

It's nice to offer some prizes for your top three teams, but difficult when budgets are limited, and it's hard to know how many families will be part of a team. I ended up offering three gift baskets with assorted smaller prizes in each, and teams could divide those up as needed. Sometimes I purchased them, and sometimes PTA donated or paid for prize items. If you have a relationship with community businesses who will donate gift cards or items, that's another way to go.

I didn't offer prizes for movie makers (more on that process below), because I didn't want to formally rank them, just showcase them. I did feature some of the movies on the school video announcements afterward, and we used our library button maker to create badges for the movie makers. We also made some candy bags for our emcees.

Collaboration is one of the best parts of this event, if you can make it work. The first time, think of it as just a trial or practice round. But as the event grows and more people have attended and know the tradition, it can expand. My friend Kristen and I collaborated for our first year - we each did one event on our own elementary campus in the fall and then a combined event in the spring. We thought about trying to book an actual movie theatre and go the red carpet route, but we didn't get to that level yet. Another next-level extension would be to encourage students to submit films to other existing competitions, whether that involves matching criteria to theirs, or supporting students to modify their entries after your campus event.

At my middle school, I was able to collaborate with our drama teacher, who coordinated her original film assignment to coincide with our event date. That meant we had a lot more movies to include in the festival (and she's amazing, so she also showed up at the event and made popcorn with the school's machine to offer people as they entered the cafeteria).

Student Emcees
I asked students to read the questions and answers at the event without viewing them first, so I needed good readers. I had my emcees audition by reading a paragraph that I wrote to include a couple of challenging phrases, and made sure they could sound friendly and clear. Typically, four is a great number, because they can trade off reading introductory information and rules, and then pairs can alternate reading questions for each round and introducing the movies. But some years, you just get a lot of great candidates and six works, too!

Student emcees for Family Trivia Night and Student Film Festival

The Film Festival Piece

Lots of students want to make a movie, but not as many finish the project. Getting appropriate student entries the first time takes some marketing, and it's helpful if you have a couple of different examples so they get the idea. As the campus librarian, I did some short activities with classes to get students going - using stop motion apps, green screen scenes, and editing with WeVideo, for example. This helped get students familiar with the possibilities, but it was not enough by itself to get many movies made, because it did take additional time out of class to make it happen.
Also, some of the student films were weird, and I say that with all possible love - but I mean, stylistically and in terms of topics and themes - things I would never have predicted or expected. That was both creatively good and problematic in terms of a family event. For example, some student filmmakers think their blooper takes are hilarious and end the movies with bloopers that are as long if not longer than the movie itself. Others are interested in special effects, even if their use doesn't add up to a coherent story. You don't want to have an evening full of identical movies, but you do want to have a clear plot and message presented in a way that is entertaining to both kids and adults.
I set expectations that the movies could not be longer than 2 minutes - because audiences who are not enthralled with a particular type of movie can sit that long before it changes without getting restless, and because it forces storytellers to get right to the point. Movies could be of any genre (adventure, documentary, humor) or style (still frame photos, live action, stop motion), but they had to be appropriate for a school audience and needed to be original work created by campus students.

This slide, with sample movie topics, may help students see that many different types of movies are welcome

I offered a set of guidelines in a slideshow that focused on copyright, tips for success, movie topic examples, and directions for submitting films, and shared that with the marketing materials.

The movie submission deadline is important - because you may be rushing to get as many submissions as possible and want to extend the timeline, but that will force you to rush on the other end, so avoid that if possible. You'll want time to let judges view all the entries to determine which movies will be included in the festival, and time to announce the results and communicate that in time for movie makers and their families to plan to attend the event.

Our school district uses Google, so I asked that movies be uploaded to Google Drive and shared with me as an editor (or submitted to a Google Classroom just for the event), in addition to completing a Google Form with logistics before the deadline.

 

Sample Slide from Movie Guidelines

Slide from Movie Guidelines

Tips to Movie Makers from Guidelines Presentation

Film Fest Entry Form for Students, 1

Film Fest Entry Form for Students, Part 2

Film Fest Entry Form for Students, Part 3

Taking time to ask some of these explicit questions on the film fest registration form - what genre does the student intend this film to be, what is the title, and so forth can be really helpful later on. Some student movies don't present the title in the film itself, so having it means you can easily refer to the specific movie with judges and add it to the slide presentation. Sometimes the message is unclear, so knowing the intended genre is helpful to understand a wordless stop motion Lego story. And having some of the important guidelines emphasized on the registration form makes them more likely to be followed.

Sample Film Judging Criteria (which is also shared with students)

Sample Film Judging Criteria, page 2

Once you have determined which movies you plan to show at the event, you'll want to notify all the students who submitted movies, and add the selected movies directly into the trivia presentation. Again, it was really helpful to have students share their movies with me in Google Drive by the deadline so I could view them when we were ready for judging, and so I could add them to the trivia slide presentation when that was being finalized. Depending on how many movies you choose, and how long each movie is, you could have anywhere from 3-15 movies at the event. When I had a lot of submissions, I did two at the very beginning of the event, two or three in between each round of trivia, and two or three right before the winners were announced. Spacing the films in between rounds of trivia keeps the participants entertained while the scoring is happening, and the trivia people get to connect with movie makers while the movie makers (and goers) get to try out trivia. The whole event lasts about ninety minutes to two hours.

Trivia Night and Film Festival has been a really fun, worthwhile community event. Even if it's small at first, it's still a great experience for those who participate, and it teaches people what to expect and generates excitement about the next one. If you can run one in the fall and another in the spring, it's a great way to gain momentum so that students who missed it in the fall can get those movies completed for the spring event. Market lots to students and families, get teachers on board, and before you know it you'll have a memorable school community tradition.