We’ve been winding down a release in PLM at Vertafore and before the next release starts up we’re spending a week doing some educational activities. The first couple of days will all be internal activities. We call them Developer Advancement Working Group days or DAWG days for short. The final three days of the week will be AngularJS training sessions instructed by egghead.io.

To help kick off the week in a fun way, I have put together a quiz bowl and setup a tournament to test our teams’ knowledge on computers, geek culture, science, and Vertafore trivia.

I kind of went all out. I picked up a 10-player lockout buzzer system, got some help compiling over 200 quiz questions, and wrote a quick little Angular web page to keep track of the score while games are being played. There’s also a prize for the winning team.

The score keeper is out on GitHub in case anyone else wants to hold such an event. I tried keeping it simple enough that you can start or reset timers and adjust the score without looking at the screen. Just press the appropriate key and voilà! The team names can also be set at any time by clicking on the default team names and entering new values. There are more details about how to use the software on the GitHub page.

If you try it out, let me know what you think by commenting here or creating an issue on GitHub.

Special thanks to Rich McLaughlin for teaching me how to play sounds in a browser!