Donald S. Coon

Recently, I volunteered to create/run a trivia night for the American Society of Gravitational and Space Research (ASGSR) conference I’ll be attending soon. I have been to many a trivia night at my local breweries and have a background in education that required creating meaningful questions. I thought it would be easy and similar to creating questions for an assignment or exam. Turns out though I was wrong, and it’s much harder to create questions across a wide range of subjects for fun rather than evaluation.

Questions for entertainment

Right off the bat I realized what the key difference between writing an exam and making trivia was, the intent. One is to evaluate if the students understand the material delivered to them, the other is to create an engaging mental activity that allows socialization. An exam covers materials that every student should know, mostly at an individual level. At trivia the subjects can be anything, and everyone on the team has a chance to be useful during a given week.

However, this event is literally a room full of experts in their fields, and I’m trying to create a fun challenge for all of them. Something that is not so easy that everyone gets all the questions right, but not something so difficult and obscure that no one does well. I’m not supposed to be evaluating their knowledge attainment; I’m supposed to provide a couple hours of entertainment. Once I realized that things got a little bit easier, but not much.

A Broad Spread of Knowledge

The next challenge I encountered was finding a balance of subjects. Most trivia events occur weekly, so subjects can come and go, allowing for wider range over time. I didn’t have that luxury, so I needed to hit a wide range of subjects in a single event. Which was further complicated by the breadth of ASGSR. At the conference there will be both academic and industry folks presenting at sessions including physics, fluids, plants, cells, soft matter, microbes, vertebrates, omics, and all the various intersections between these disciplines. So the questions needed to cover a similar range, without being heavily focused on any one subject. That is a lot to cover, especially when I have a bias towards trivia about plants and biological life support systems. Fortunately, it was nothing that some good old-fashioned googling and a few Wikipedia rabbit hole dives couldn’t solve.

Trying to avoid numbers

One thing I did try to avoid was answers that involved numbers. Partially because I don’t like those questions myself, but also partially because with space being involved some of the numbers can get quite large. Can you imagine trying to answer “Within ± 1,000,000,000 miles, how many miles away is voyager 1?” (Answer roughly 16,094,799,105). Add in the fact that most of these numbers are constantly changing, because things are rarely stationary in space, it’s better not to include them.

I also skipped asking questions that revolved around knowing what year things happen. Despite never changing, unless there is a person on every team with an encyclopedic memory, the possibility of knowing the exact year for anything beyond major events is slim. I want people to have fun not to be annoyed that they didn’t know the exact number or year related to that cool event that they know the science and plenty of other details behind.

Conclusion

I thought making a trivia night would be a natural transition from education because they both involved asking questions. I was wrong, it’s not easy. It takes a level of understanding about what people know and like to craft something engaging and fun that goes beyond evaluating knowledge. I now have an even deeper respect for the people who somehow create an evening of trivia for their community to enjoy every week. So, if you are a regular at a trivia night, let them know how much you appreciate the effort those people put in every week, I certainly will be next time I go.

©Donald Coon 2025 available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17780476