85. Free Bible Quiz

Several years ago we started playing Bible quiz each night with our kids. We started out with easy questions like, "Who built the ark?" and gradually added more difficult questions as they mastered the easier ones. We tried to make if fun by managing it so they could always get about 80% of the questions right. After all, it's only fun to be quizzed if you know most of the answers. In addition, I tried to have some questions that were weird, funny, or gross--kids eat up that kind of stuff. The kids loved the vast array of things they were learning, and the trivia questions would frequently spark other biblical questions that we would take the time to stop, look up, and discuss. Over time, we ran out of the off-the-top-of-your-head type of questions, and had to start adding in questions that were new to us. Before we knew it, some of them knew an incredible amount of Bible facts.

I'm really not interested in our kids knowing a bunch of senseless trivia. However, I am interested in them falling in love with God. Learning "trivia" helped them become more familiar with the characters, places, and events in the Bible. This made the Bible easier to understand, and more interesting to read. I believe this has helped them greatly in their spiritual development.

Like many parenting efforts, this was just a season in our lives, and we no longer do it consistently. It became complicated to continue as we had more children, but we still dabble in it from time to time. However, when we were aggressively working on it, I wrote down the questions, and made them so that they could be put into a Palm Pilot application.

If you would like to make use of what we have come up with, here are some files you can download:

• A further explanation of how we use the questions: (Word/Pdf)
• A brief set of sample questions: (Word/Pdf)
• 150 basic Old Testament questions: (Word/Pdf)
• All 600 quiz questions: (Word/Pdf)

If you would like the quiz program for your PC or Palm it's a little trickier. You need two things. First of all, you need the list of quiz questions, and then you need the quizzing program itself. Ideally, life would be simpler if you could have someone (like me) beam these to your Palm Pilot. If you do not know anyone that has the program, then you can get the two necessary files here.

1) The file of quiz questions you need is here. Both the Palm and PC/Windows Quizzler programs use this same PDB file (Palm DataBase file) as a source for the questions.

2) From the Quizzler web site you can download a free version of the quizzing program for your Palm Pilot, PC, or both.

To download Quizzler, click on one of the links below, or choose from the Quizzler download options.

* Palm OS
* Pocket PC
* PC/Windows
* Mac

For the palm you need to install Quizzler and “The Bible Challenge.” You’ll need to do a HotSync to get the files onto your Palm. Once you start Quizzler, select “The Bible Challenge” from the Quiz List page and then select “Quiz Options.” From the Quiz Options screen you can choose what chapter you’d like to be quizzed on. You should also set the 'Sequence' to 'Random' and the 'Answers' to 'Multiple Choice'. Choose “Begin” to start the quiz.

For the PC you need to install Quizzler (from the PC-Windows option above) and copy the “The Bible Challenge” to your hard drive. Click on “File” and “Open Quiz PDB File…” to select “The Bible Challenge” as your quiz. From the Quiz Options screen you can choose what chapter you’d like to be quizzed on as well as some other less important choices. Choose “Begin” to start the quiz. Single click on answers. If you double click your first click will be read, a new question will start, and your second click will count as an attempted answer on the second question.

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