A full-stack application to facilitate high school Quiz Bowl practice sessions
Quiz Bowl is an academic trivia game played many students across middle schools, high schools, and colleges in the USA. During a typical Quiz Bowl match, two teams of 4-5 players listen to a sequence of trivia questions called "tossups." While listening to a particular question, all players can "buzz in" to answer the question but cannot speak to their teammates. If the player answers incorrectly (called a "neg"), then their team loses 5 points and its players cannot buzz in until the next tossup starts. On the other hand, if the player answers correctly, then his/her team will receive 10 points or even 15 points (called a "power"), if the player answered correctly early in the question. Once a player answers correctly, their team is given a "bonus" - a set of three questions, each worth 10 points, which all members of the team can work together on to answer.
To visualize the rules of a standard Quiz Bowl match, please refer to the following YouTube videos produced by the Quiz Bowl companies NAQT and PACE:
This project started during the Fall 2023 iteration of Davidson College's CSC 353 (Database Systems) course. For each student's final project, they had to build a software in pairs/groups to apply the knowledge of databases which they gained in the course.
Due to the large enjoyment which he had when playing Quiz Bowl in high school, Delario Nance, Jr. wanted to build a Quiz Bowl-related software for his CSC 353 project. To gain more ideas, Nance reached out to DuBose Tuller, who Nance knew had also played Quiz Bowl in high school. Tuller responded by stating that he had already found a partner Shahin Ahmadi but would be happy to explore Nance's idea. Eventually, Nance, Tuller, and Ahmadi decided to work together to build a Quiz Bowl-related software for their final project. After brainstorming over an software to build, the team ultimately decided to build a full-stack application in which high school Quiz Bowl coaches could: (1) register their players, (2) generate random tossups to read to their players, and (3) record each players' results from matches.
- Client Technologies
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Server Technologies
- Node.js
- Express.js
- Embedded JavaScript (EJS)
- Database Technologies
- MySQL
- Additional Technologies
- QB Reader API
- ChatGPT
- Microsoft Copilot
- Dr. Hammurabi Mendes, for teaching Davidson College's Fall 2023 iteration of CSC 353 (Database Systems), for giving advice on how to design the project's database schema, and for providing a template on creating full-stack web apps with JavaScript
- ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, for providing CSS snippets for styling and for answering questions about JavaScript syntax
- Geoffrey Wu, for creating the QBReader website whose API was used in this project to generate random tossups during matches