I’ve been using Kahoot for several years to create competitive quiz games like 21 blitz for my students. It’s a great tool for reviewing previously covered concepts and breaking up lectures with quick knowledge checks. So, when a colleague encouraged me to check out Poll Everywhere’s new Competitions feature, I was skeptical. I have students who literally cheer when I announce that it’s time for a Kahoot quiz. Even hard-to-impress faculty get caught up in the competition during workshops. They overthink their team names, agonize over answer choices, and trash talk their neighbors as points are tallied. I couldn’t possibly abandon Kahoot and run away with another quiz tool after everything we’ve been through, could I?

If you’ve never used Kahoot to create a quiz game, the process is fairly simple.

1. Create a free account online and build a series of multiple-choice questions.
2. Access the game from a computer connected to your classroom projector.
3. Have students go to the address on the screen to join the game. (They can play using a phone, laptop, or tablet.)  

As much as my students and I love Kahoot, it’s not perfect. And, as with any long-term relationship, little compromises can snowball over time until one day you find yourself wondering, “Is this the best I can do, or have a sacrificed too much? Is there a quiz-game tool out there that can make me feel truly alive again?”

Before we run to the arms of a newer quiz tool—the kind of quiz tool that would never forget your anniversary or buy you a cleaning appliance for Christmas—let’s review some of Kahoot’s biggest shortcomings.

Everything feels rushed.

In Kahoot, questions are only displayed for a few seconds before the answer choices appear and the countdown timer begins. Once the answer choices appear, students begin clicking frantically because they receive more points for faster responses. This results in a lot of hasty guesses. In addition, students who might need more time to process the question are at a big disadvantage. While Kahoot does allow a bit of control over how many seconds students have to respond, I’m disappointed that they still don’t allow instructors to remove the timer completely. There’s also no option to award the same number of points for all correct responses regardless of how long it took each student to choose an answer.

Answer choices don’t show on students’ devices.

When answer choices are revealed on the projector screen, each answer has a shape next to it. When students respond on their devices, they only see the shapes that correspond with the answers shown on the main screen in your classroom. The Kahoot team says this approach forces students to look at the projector more often, which makes the game more of a social experience than it would be if students spent the entire time staring at their devices. While I’m sure this is true, this means students in the front and students with better eyesight have an unfair advantage, as they have an easier time reading the answers on the screen.

At least one person will probably experience technical issues.

In a class of 20 to 30 participants, I typically have one or two who get kicked out mid-game or say there’s a delay between the time they press the answer and the time it registers in the system, which costs them points. While every system will have its share of bugs (and I don’t want to be too critical of a tool that offers a lot of great features at little to no cost to teachers), it’s always frustrating when a student can’t enjoy the game because of technical difficulties. It’s also never a good feeling as an instructor when your students complain about a technical issue that is completely out of your hands.

Enter Poll Everywhere Competitions

I’d hoped my brief tryst with Poll Everywhere Competitions would prove anticlimactic—like a casino buffet that runs out of crab legs the minute your table is ready. Yet, I have to admit that Poll Everywhere seems to have one-upped Kahoot in terms of features. Here are a few key examples.

The timer is optional in Poll Everywhere.

Being able to control the pace of your quiz is by far the biggest advantage to using Poll Everywhere over Kahoot. When the timer is disabled, you can decide exactly when to stop accepting responses and reveal answers. This makes for a less stressful game and encourages more thoughtful answer selection. Disabling the timer also creates a more level playing field, since all students receive the same number of points for correct answers regardless of how quickly they respond.

You can have more than four answer choices.

I’m not sure how often I’ll use this feature, but it’s nice to have the option to add a fifth answer choice every once in a while.  

Each answer choice can have a unique image.

While Kahoot does allow an image to be added to a question, you can’t add an image to each answer choice. Again, this might not be useful for every instructor or every quiz topic, but it’s nice to have the option.

Poll Everywhere does more than just games.

Kahoot makes it easy to build fun, fast-paced quiz games, but that’s all it does. Poll Everywhere, on the other hand, supports a wide variety of formats for informal class polls and surveys. If you’re already feeling overwhelmed by the number of classroom technologies and passwords you have to keep up with, you might prefer to use Poll Everywhere, as it provides a broader range of tools to keep students engaged and encourage knowledge retrieval.

Poll Everywhere Drawbacks

The ability to turn off the response timer and award students equal points regardless of their response speed is a huge selling feature for Poll Everywhere Competitions. But is that worth throwing away everything Kahoot and I have built together? Before we break up what was once a happy home, let’s take a look at the ways Poll Everywhere Competitions fall short.

I had trouble saving my Competition questions.

2/15/19 UPDATE: Poll Everywhere’s CTO reached out the day this article was published to make sure the issues I ran into are resolved ASAP. I know from past experience that their customer service team responds quickly, so it’s worth taking the time to submit a support request if you run into technical issues.

The Competitions feature has been around for several months now, but it seems there are still some bugs in the system. When I first tried to build a Competition quiz in mid-January, I got a very vague error message that my questions couldn’t be saved. I tried everything to work around this. I even tried using a different browser, with no luck.

When I tried creating a new Competition a few weeks later, I ran into a similar issue after trying to save my second question. This time, there was no error message. Clicking the save button simply didn’t do anything. I was finally able to save multiple questions after starting from scratch, but the loss of work was extremely frustrating. It seems the most recent issue was due to the fact that my answer choices included certain characters or HTML tags that Poll Everywhere doesn’t accept. While many instructors might never encounter this problem, it’s concerning that the system provided no clear, automatic warnings so that I could simply remove the unacceptable characters and save my work.

Students can’t choose their nicknames.

It seems that Poll Everywhere assigns a bizarre, random name to each participant. In a recent test, mine was “Voiceless Parched Leaf,” and the winner of my latest in-class quiz was “Spiffy Rugged Milk.” While these nicknames can be entertaining, they can also make it difficult to track student participation. Hopefully, Poll Everywhere will add an option in the near future allowing students to enter their own name before beginning a quiz.

The interface isn’t particularly fun.

Poll Everywhere Competitions still uses the same old corporate bar charts and conservative shades of blue that they’ve always used. (Nothing says “party time” like a series of grayish blue bar charts!) Kahoot, on the other hand, has several features that make quizzes feel more like a game when compared to Poll Everywhere. There’s playful music in the “lobby” where students enter their names, the color palette is bright, the text is bold and easy to read, and transitions between screens feature subtle animations that add a bit of whimsy.

In Conclusion

When my love affair with Kahoot began a few years ago, I had such high hopes for what we could create together. We’ve had some great times, but it feels like we’ve grown apart. I find myself wishing that Kahoot would woo me again and give me more control over the pace of my games, and now Poll Everywhere has rolled into town with a quiz game that really gets me—one that listens and understands my needs.

But Poll Everywhere Competitions aren’t perfect. They feel a bit tacked on to the existing polling interface without much investment in customizing the look and game mechanics. And while I think my issue with saving questions was more of a minor hiccup than a sign of larger reliability issues, it’s hard to say for sure.

For now, I’m not ready to be exclusive, but who knows what the future holds. If Competitions takes a little time to “work on itself,” I might have to tell Kahoot this just isn’t working anymore.