Next Move Quiz
Pearson Education
Free on Apple iOS
Well, it ain’t pretty, but it does what it says on the label.
Next Move Quiz is, you guessed it, a series of quizzes on a variety of subjects – culture, food, general knowledge, geography, history, the list goes on. The quiz gets a point immediately for having ‘The Hobbit’ as its first cultural quiz but loses it for spelling it ‘The Hobbitt’ in one of the questions; fool of a Took! (For purists, I’m aware that that’s a LOTR quote , but it’s called Hobbetic license).
First off, the app is very simply set out and pretty hideous. There are various Clip Art-style images for each category (the Hobbit has the worst one, some guy in a Gandalf Halloween costume, possibly a friend of the developer), but the questions are interesting and not too difficult but not too easy – perfect quiz fodder.
There are various incentives to keep you quizzing, such as a timer and running score, and there are various cheat options, such as freezing time, going 50/50 (phone a friend is an option your device, but not the app necessarily, will allow you), and auto answer – understandably you can only use these once each in any given quiz.
The categories are not hugely varied, but do include quizzes on Quidditch, World Wars, Strange Seas, FIFA World Cup if you’re so inclined and Crazy Bodies. There’s also a Next Move section which is where the ‘education’ part really comes into play; this is a series of grammatical exercises for kids (or adults who need it), where you select the appropriate word for the gap left in a sentence, in various subject matter sections. If you’re not looking to improve your grammar (which one, of course, always should be) then I’d advise skipping this section, although there is the occasional gem in the form of options such as ‘listenphones’ for the question ‘I like to listen to my _____’.
An annoying part of the app is that once you’ve started a quiz, you can’t exit out of it – you have to finish it (or just leave it running until you run out of time on each question and get the worst score of all time).
However, for a free app which bills itself as an educational exercise, I think it does this well; there are interesting questions, topics kids will be sure to be interested in and it’s simple to use while teaching new facts and grammar.
Credit must go to Rhys ‘Puntastic’ Brookbanks for the quiz puns.