Community Challenge Help

Moderation

Creating a Community Challenge Event

Creating your own Community Challenge Events is easy. Simply log in, and click the 'Create a Challenge' link on the menu bar.

You will be asked to complete a form which collects information about your Event. You MUST enter a name for the Event, a date, and the names of between two and four participating teams.

Setting the Questions

After you have created your Challenge Event you will be invited to input the questions and answers for each of the three Rounds.
You do not have to do this immediately. In fact you can modify your Event (the Event details and the Questions and Answers) as many times as you like up until the Event starts.

Choosing 'good' questions

As the Community Challenge is intended to be taken by teams of players, often with access to the Internet to help them to answer the questions, it is important that at least some of the questions are designed to be a bit more difficult than the average 'pub quiz' question.

One way of doing this is to take your 'pub quiz' question and turn it around to make it more of a challenge. For example, in an early Challenge Event the question 'A Ragdoll is a breed of what?' was posed. The answer is 'cat'. This could have be turned around to make it more difficult to answer with a cursory Internet search - 'Which breed of Cat sounds like it should be a child's toy?'

Another way to make questions more challenging is to make them broader. For example, instead of 'Which team won the FA Cup in 1928', ask 'Which team has won the FA Cup exactly twice as often as Newcastle United'. I made this one up - there may not be an answer.

General

Setting up your membership

You can register your team using the form on the Home page..

Give some thought to the first question because the name you enter for your community or group is what will appear on the scoreboard.

Give some consideration to the last couple of questions too. Enter something short and memorable for your username because it is this that you will log on with in future. Also choose a password that you are not going to forget ten minutes later (write it down!) Remember that in future it may be someone else using these details to log on.

Enter the e-mail address of the contact person carefully too, as this is where a password reminder will be sent, and also another Community looking for someone to challenge may wish to contact you from the directory page.

Spectating

To watch a challenge as a spectator all you need to do is go to the Community Challenge website in good time for the agreed start time of the event. Enter the site and click on view challenges. Find the one you are interested in and click on view. You can enter encouraging (and discouraging) messages in the message board.

Terms & Conditions of use

1. The Community-Challenge.com online application ('the website') was conceived and developed by The University of Teesside with the support of BECTa.

2. Use of the website is free to non-commercial users.

3. The logos used on the site are Copyright of their respective owners.

4. Images uploaded to the site by Challenge users remain the Copyright of the photographer or creator.

5. Users may only upload images to the website with the permission of the Copyright owner.

6. By uploading an image to this site a user conveys the right for Community-Challenge.com to use that image on the site and for other purposes related to the promotion of Community-Challenge.com and the Community Media activities of The University of Teesside.

7. User registration data will only be used in the normal operation of the website and by The University of Teesside as stated below. User registration data will never be passed to third-parties.

8. From time to time, for the purposes of academic research, users may be contacted about their use of the website.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's it all about?

Community Challenge was conceived by Steve Thompson of The University of Teesside.
The first few Challenge events were run 'manually', with moderators hacking away at pre-prepared web pages between rounds to update the scores and activate the links to the question and answer pages. Answers were submitted by email. The Challenge experience was great fun and all of the events were a great success.

What was needed was a 'tool' that made moderation easier and the entire process smoother.

This is that tool.

The developers

Community Challenge was conceived by Steve Thompson of The University of Teesside.

Functional specification was a joint effort with Steve Thompson, Andrew Vause and Dave Eagle all contributing (all University of Teesside).

Andrew Vause designed the original graphics and basic page templates.
Dave Eagle designed the back-end database (MySQL) and designed and implemented the site (originally in PERL, but now in PHP with some JavaScript).

Original language translation was carried out by Heike van Steensel.

Additional ideas and support came from Alastair Clark & colleagues at BECTa.

Pioneer testing by the communities of Skinningrove and Trimdon, UK.

The University of Teesside

The University of Teesside is located in Middlesbrough in the North East of England. The University has been involved in using ICT in the development of local communities since 1996.

Competing

Taking part

To Take part in a Challenge as a competitor all you need to do is go to the Community Challenge website in good time for the agreed start time. Enter the site and logon using your user name and password. Find the Challenge you are taking part in and click on 'Play'. You will now see a scoreboard with the names of all the competitors and the scores for the 3 rounds which at the start will all be zero. If this is not the case either you arrived late or you are in the wrong Challenge! The screen will refresh every 10 seconds and at the appointed time you will see Round One go live - i.e. it will become a red hyperlink. Click on it and you will now see the questions for round one.

Rules

Rule 1

The Moderator is always right.

Rule 2

There are no other rules.