The Pubquiz Overengineered

What is it?

A system that generates HTML slide show pubquizzes from YAML files. Multiple types of questions are supported, i.e.,

• simple text questions,
• image questions,
• audio questions and
• video questions.

Question categories with sub-questions also supported.

Media questions can be specified by a URL and are automatically downloaded and cached. For audio and video questions, links to, e.g., YouTube can be specified. Synquiz will download the video, extract audio, if needed, and cut to the specified length.

Example

A quiz is specified by a YAML file, quiz.yaml.

title: Funquiz
subtitle: Example pubquiz
quiz:
    # Simple text question
    - type: text
      text: What does the acronym VIM stand for?
      answer: Vi IMproved

    # If no type is specified, text is assumed
    - text: What killed the cat?
      answer: Frank Underwood

    # Image question. Image is saved to data directory.
    - type: image
      text: What is the Italian name for this type of pasta?
      url: https://image.freepik.com/free-photo/close-up-dry-fusilli_23-2147749537.jpg
      answer: Fusilli

    # Audio question. YouTube video is downloaded and audio extracted.
    - type: audio
      url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mpWuJ8plhU
      len: 7
      text: From which movie does this quote originate?
      answer: Sneakers

    # Video question. YouTube video is downloaded.
    - type: video
      url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiXNUaSjXRY
      text: What was Roger Murtaugh's response?
      start: 0
      len: 12
      answer:
          # Video answer. YouTube video is downloaded.
          type: video
          url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiXNUaSjXRY
          text: It's just been revoked
          hide_question: true

    - type: audio
      url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7ZrWOGIbIE
      text: Which TV show features this theme song?
      start: 0
      len: 24
      answer:
          type: image
          url: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNTExZDVkM2YtZTJkMS00NmU4LTk4YmQtZDZkOTJjMzZlYWFiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTA4NzY1MzY@._V1_.jpg

    # Super questions. A category of questions with multiple sub-questions.
    - type: super
      text: What do these logos represent?
      questions:
        - type: image
          url: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Rebel_Alliance_logo.svg
          answer: The Rebel Alliance

        - type: image
          url: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Aperture_Science.svg/1024px-Aperture_Science.svg.png
          answer: Aperture Laboratories

        - type: image
          url: https://1000logos.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Marmot-symbol.jpg
          answer: Marmot

        - type: image
          url: https://vuejs.org/images/logo.png
          answer: Vue.js

Demo

• Demo: The quiz generated by Synquiz with the file above.
• Answer demo: The answer version of the quiz generated by Synquiz.

Requirements

Synquiz requires the following to be installed

• git
• npm
• yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp (optional, only needed for audio/video questions)
• ffmpeg (optional, only needed for audio/video questions)

Installation

Synquiz can be installed via pip:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/hjalti/synquiz@master

Setup

After installation, Synquiz must be initialized

synquiz manage init

Making a quiz

# Initialize a quiz
synquiz init my_quiz

# Start a watcher and server
synquiz watch my_quiz

Now you can open my_quiz/quiz.yaml and open aim your browser at http://localhost:8000. When the file is edited, the quiz slide show will automatically update.

Future work

• Find a less bulky slideshow framework