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Jeopardy

Motivation

I was inspired by Tom Scott's YouTube game show Lateral to create a trivia series for Silicon Valley Offbeat Fun.

If I wanted to play my own game, I needed to find pre-made questions so I would not know the answers. The quality of online trivia databases is usually low—see Open Trivia DB.

Questions from Jeopardy are known to be high quality. Thanks to a dedicated fanbase, more than 300,000 questions from over 30 years on air are archived online.

Operation

Questions are pulled from the J! Archive using jService, then are displayed to look like the real Jeopardy television show.

One person operates the game. The program is designed to run on a laptop connected to a TV. The laptop's display is only visible to the operator, and the TV is visible to all the contestants. The operator reads questions out loud and judges whether a response is close enough to the correct answer.

Buzzers

Commercial buzzers for trivia exist but are very expensive.

My DIY solution uses Linemaster Treadlite foot switches and parts from an HP 697737 USB Keyboard. It is similar to this project which uses Staples Easy Buttons.