Smarterer’s mission is to put a number (or a score) on the skills we write about in our resumes. If you have the smarts, let’s head below and see how Smarterer and its battery of tests validate your digital savvy.

What Is Smarterer?

Smarterer tests your skill level and knowledge in the digital apps you use every day. The web app has developed a proprietary system and algorithm that can benchmark anyone’s skill in just 10 questions and 60 seconds.

The Smarterer blog says – Smarterer’s scoring algorithm validates and quantifies skills using an 800 point scale, similar to the GMAT or SAT, and provides users labels such as “smart”, “smarter,” and “smarterer” to describe their skill level at a glance. Only 5 percent of users score in the top level, which reflects the adaptive nature of the algorithm and their rank against the community of users.

More importantly, the blog also says that Smarterer is designed for professionals within the first 10 years of their careers — college students who have little experience (but a broad set of skills that make them employable) and individuals who are making their first or second career move and need to show skills to get the next great job.

Bring On The Tests…

Register and log into Smarterer. Smarterer allows us to take as well as create skill assessment tests. Just to get a feel of things, I think I will take a few tests and see how I score. There are nearly 70+ tests with the likes of Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn interspersed in the midst of tests like Dog Training and Literature for Children.

Some of these tests are of course user-created but it goes to show that as the variety starts piling up, you can really put all facets of your personality under the scanner.

Here’s a screen from the Google Search test I opened with:

You can try out the single test question just to get a feel of things and how the system times you through each question. Correct responses are indicated by green, incorrect ones get emblazoned in red.

The tests are rapid and each question needs to be answered in 20 seconds or less. The screenshot below shows how I fared with Facebook (the results from my Google Search test weren’t red hot!):

Your ‘smartness’ gets measured on an 800 point scale. As the screen shows, I am merely ‘smart’ so far, not the smartest one around. You can share your score via Twitter or Facebook. But I think I will make an attempt at improving them before I let the whole world in. You can answer a few more questions to improve your score and graduate up the smartness scale. There are some things which influence the final score. This is where the ‘intelligence’ of the site kicks in.

Smarterer not only allows you to add your own questions to existing tests, but also create a brand new skill assessment test on a topic. You can create the tests, write the questions, and design the answers. If all goes well with the tests and your answers, you can see yourself on the leader board. Moreover, you can ‘show off’ you score with an embedded badge on your blog, website, or email.

There’s lot to like about Smarterer: from its very user-friendly and clean design to the speed of the tests. I liked the scoring system which made picking up the points not just a case of answering correctly. Do you have the smarts? Take a test on Smarterer and let us know your score for this quiz and learning app.

You may or may not travel to this not-so-outlandish place but a travel quiz can throw up interesting tidbits like these. Surprisingly, travel quizzes aren’t that many on the web or it could be that Google Search failed me when I went ‘travelling’ for travel quizzes. Though the ones I found made me realize that there’s a big leap between one’s geographical IQ and travel IQ. Is that your story too?

Take these seven travel quizzes and find out if you know your Timbuktu from Shangri-La.

The Traveler IQ Challenge

The travel blog has a neat Flash travel quiz which tests how well you know your world. We had seen this game in action in our post on 10 Online Geography Games That Help Kids Know More About The World. You can choose from the different game plays available based on region, flags, and photos. It is the Photos of the World I find most fun. You will be surprised that it’s quite difficult to land them on the map.

Discover Your Visual DNA

This is a short and easy quiz which surprisingly gave me a close to accurate result. Perhaps, it was because I was pretty sure of the kind of travel holidays I enjoy. A series of thumbnails helps to determine your choice of location, food, company etc and arrive at your ‘travel personality’. A proprietary VisualDNA Technology is used to understand your travel type. Partners can use this travel quiz to pinpoint their likely travel destination.

National Geographic

One of the world’s best magazine’s on natural sciences is also about travel by default. One look at their illustrations and you just might fall in love with the places shown. So, if you love the exotic and wondrous, check out the series of quizzes. There are Featured Travel Quiz, Country and Continent Quizzes, City Quizzes, National Park Quizzes, and Road Trip Quizzes. Check out some of the featured quizzes like Unfinished Landmarks or Mysterious Places. Most of the quizzes come from National Geographic’s Traveler Magazine.

Are You a Savvy Traveler?

Find your travel IQ at Infohub.com. The specialty travel guide features information on many destinations around the world. One way of piquing interest is through travel quizzes. You can register for free or play as an anonymous user. Registered members can start their own tournaments. The selection of travel quizzes quite diverse, with most based on locations. There is a travel quiz especially for women travelers. Registration is free and members can quickly set up their own private quiz tournaments to find out the travel IQ of their friends or family before starting a trip. Quizzes have author recommendations as answers and explanations give an insight into the culture of the place.

How Green a Traveler Are You?

Guardian UK has a long standing 12 question quiz which can help you decide if you are an eco-conscious traveler or not. The multiple choice travel quiz is hardly a boring round of obvious answers, but with ones that could just befuddle and bemuse you, and hopefully make you think twice when you pack your bags next.

What Kind Of A Traveler Are You?

The travel site Best Trip Choices gives you another chance to find out what kind of a traveler are you with its 5-minute travel quiz. Take the scientifically validated Plog Travel Personality Quiz to learn about yourself and what kinds of destinations you will probably like the most. When you’ve completed it, you get a list of destinations that others with your personality recommend. The quiz asks for a US Zip code at the end before giving you the analysis which is quite detailed.

MSN Australia – Travel

The Australian MSN portal has a nice lineup of offbeat travel quizzes. If you are a monarchist you just might like the timely How well do you know Wills and Kate quiz. My personal choice goes to the Guess the movie location round of questions.

Playing a few rounds of travel quizzes is undoubtedly fun. But not more than travel itself. Go to these websites for some free travel tips –

The 10 Best Free International Travel Guide Websites

10 Websites For Virtual Sightseeing With Travel Videos

The Best Travel Deals Sites To Save Cash On Your Next Vacation

Drop us a hint if you know of any cool travel quiz out there.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Whilst Yahoo Answers focuses on genuine, helpful answers to every day predicaments; Facebook Questions is more likely to teach you something new about your online associates than do your homework for you.

At the time of writing the service hasn’t been rolled out in its entirety yet, read on to find out how to enable it on your account before everyone else.

Enabling Facebook Questions

In order to enable Questions on your account before everyone else (which somewhat defeats the purpose, if you think about it) simply visit facebook.com/questions and click the Get Questions Now button. You’ll receive a notification that the feature has been enabled on your account.

You should then be taken to the main Facebook Questions page. In future you can get here using an option in the menu on the left of the main Facebook home page, underneath your picture and name.

The Questions Page

Depending on whether any of your friends have used the service yet, the main Questions page is where you’ll find a summary of your contacts’ recent activity. Questions answered are displayed as social actions, much like checking in to Places, updating relationship info and clicking Like.

Along with the question your friend answered, Questions also displays the options (if the question is multiple choice), other possible/popular answers and who has answered with which response.

You can also take part yourself in other people’s questions, as anyone on Facebook can answer any question. In theory if you pose a particularly popular teaser which is shared by lots of people, you’ll see your question snowball and receive lots of answers.

Answering a question is as simple as you’d expect, simply click on an answer and your choice will be tallied. Really, that’s it.

The Follow button beneath a question will keep track of that particular friend’s Questions activity in future, whilst the Ask Friends option allows you to target a specific question to a group of friends of your choosing. Once again, there’s no private, closed questions (at least not yet) so these can in fact be answered by anyone.

Asking A Question

You can ask a question directly from your news feed, as if you were going to update your status. Click Question and input your query into the text box. You can either ask a question that your friends must answer themselves, or you can click Add Poll Options to add pre-defined responses.

You can choose to allow others to add responses to this list, or close it off completely. Responses can be anything you choose, but Facebook will check whether there’s a page that suits your potential answer. This is not the case for personal profiles, however.

Once you’ve submitted your question it will appear in the news feed and on your profile where you can click the Ask Friends button to direct your question to specific friends. As your friends begin answering your question the results will be shown via a horizontal graph, and you will be notified via your usual notifications area.

Conclusion

Facebook Questions seems to be directed more at fun than the quest for knowledge, and that’s just fine. Zuckerberg’s social network is rarely a hotbed of productive behaviour anyway, with employees and students alike known to waste endless hours simply browsing, messaging and liking everything in sight.

It is for this reason that Questions is another welcome addition to the service. Now, instead of your friends asking what they should wear tonight via a status update – they can use a Question. Yep, real groundbreaking stuff!

Saying that, it should cut down on those ever-so-annoying quiz applications your friends keep inviting you to…

What do you think of the new Questions service? Have you used it yet? Makes sense? Give us your thoughts in the comments below.

Do you know how The Beatles got their name or what was their first chart-topping number one single? If you don’t know, then it’s time to brush up your musical IQ. The best part of your re-education is that you don’t have to burn the midnight oil. Thanks to the number of music trivia websites you can have a rocking time while filling your head with ‘useless facts’. Here are ten of them.

Songfacts

As the name says, the site is about song meanings, lyrics, and trivia. As soon as you land on the site, you will spy a trivia question at the top. The Mighty Songfacts Trivia Quiz asks you 10 questions and getting them right might win you a fashionable Songfacts T-shirt (though I haven’t tested it out to that extent). The site also goes behind the songs and digs out little nuggets of “˜songfacts’ that make this site a destination for trivia buffs.

MusicMini

This site comes up in the first crop of music trivia websites. The Music Trivia Quiz has levels for beginners, experts, and professionals. You have to choose the game you want to play as there are different combinations on the basic idea of listening to a song and naming the song, singer or the group. Most of the trivia rounds have multiple answers and you have to select the right one. Points stack up if you can identify all the details on the song.

Music Trivia Master

Music Trivia Master is a simple game where you can select to answer questions from different eras. You can select categories, number of questions, and genre (pop, rock, country, R&B, hip hop). Each question is timed and a free registration allows you to save your scores and get up on the leaderboard. Music Trivia Master also says it has an iPhone app but I couldn’t locate it on iTunes.

Action Quiz

Go up against the computer and see if you can score in the categories of classical music and pop music. You can start straightaway as there’s no subscription. Music categories are further divided into decades, lyrics, titles etc. The trivia quiz asks you to identify the singers behind the tracks and the album. The trivia game based on classical music has a section on music theory which could be fun for learners.

PopKwiz

Answer three questions a day everyday and by the end of the month you can be more surefooted with your musical IQ. There’s a larger dose too in the form of a 15 question timed round arranged around musical decades. Check out the archives too for previous quizzes.

Trivia Plaza

Along with other topics, you can find quite a few free trivia games on pop music and classical music here. The classical music trivia games are based on composers and their works. The pop music games are more varied with the likes of “˜American Idol’, “˜Real Names’, “˜Christmas Songs’ etc. There are some others on lyrics and title tracks released in each decade. These music trivia games and the two above have been put together by the same man.

You Got Song’d

UGO Network’s online music game gives you a few lives to get the answers right as it throws a succession of identify the song or singer questions at you. At the beginning you get to choose the category you want to get quizzed on. Hear the music and guess the answers to qualify for the leaderboard.

Mighty Quiz

Mightyquiz.com has over 3,000 topics that can test your knowledge. You can also write your own trivia questions and contribute to the site. Music alone has around 1,140 trivia questions to test your knowledge. The trivia questions come with options and you have to pick the right one. You can subscribe to your favorite topics and even follow members who send in their trivia questions. A sign-in allows you to save your progress through the questions.

Trivix

The ten year old site features quality free trivia games, quiz and flash games. Daily you can go head to head against 20 new questions in 5 different categories, music being one of them. The trivia round is timed and you can instantly see whether you answered correctly or not. A percentage figure also indicates how many got the answer right.

The Crazy Cow Music Quiz

The Facebook app takes your knowledge of music and pits it against your network of friends. Each quiz consists of 10 multiple choice trivia questions. You have to put a name to the song that plays in the background. Points are also awarded or deducted according to the time you take to answer. I could not review this Facebook app completely because inexplicably it was getting stuck at 30 percent. The app has quite a large following with nearly 700,000+ active members so my problem could be a temporary glitch.

With these ten websites and others spread throughout the web, there’s no excuse one can offer for a lack of music knowledge. Agreed, you might be looked upon as a musical nerd but armed with a brimful of trivia, you can demand right of place among all the music fans out there. If you have already secured that spot let us know about your favorite music trivia website.

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Intelligence goes deep, so rather than go into the grammar of it, let’s say that smarter or sharper, brain games are fun. And playing them all day through won’t make smoke come out of our ears. Fun brain games though can improve our skills when it comes to logic and cognition. For the elderly, brain games are as vital as physical activity.

So here are five resources for brain workouts that help to wake up those grey cells.

Lumosity

Lumosity trains your brain with 30 targeted brain games and exercises. The specialized brain training web application comes in both free and paid subscription versions. The library of games relate to speed, memory, attention, flexibility, and problem solving. The full suite of games is open to subscribers only, though those with a free account can play quite a few games across the board.

The games are well designed: the Birdwatching game works on your visual processing skills and concentration. Lumosity also has multiple courses designed by experts that bolster weak areas like weak memory, problem solving, math skills, and also brain related medical conditions like ADHD and TBI.  Don’t forget to take their free Brain Grade test.

Sharp Brains

Sharp Brains is actually a blog that keeps tabs on the brain fitness and cognitive health industry. So expect to find a lot of articles on brain health and the use of digital tools to enhance our mental muscles. The site also tries to raise social awareness on the importance of regularly exercising our mental faculties. One way is through the site’s newsletter. But if you are itching to put your brain through the paces head straight to the Teasers section. The large lineup of links to brain games, puzzles, and illusions could keep you occupied for some time.

Braingle

Braingle is a community driven website that says it has the largest collection of brain teasers, riddles, logic problems, quizzes and mind puzzles on the web. 20,000 of them is a large number. Being a part of the community helps as enthusiastic members constantly keep the site updated with the freshest picks of games. As a free member, you can also subscribe to the daily teaser.  Check out the Mentalrobics section for some cool brain workouts and articles on topics like stress management and memory.

Smart-Kit

At Smart-Kit, you get to cross train your brain on a variety of puzzles and games. All games are meant to be kid safe and designed to stimulate free thinking and problem solving. Some games like the Memory Match Game are easy while you might have to scratch your head when it comes to playing Take Something Literally. The Lateral Thinking games (which comes under the category marked ““ More) deserve a special mention here.

Brain Training 101

The founder of this brain training site (Erin Matlock) is a Mensa candidate. But what’s more interesting about the site is that it’s part of a larger bouquet of web services that includes a community website and a TV channel. But if you want to stay on in this site, then the range of interactive brain games should keep you engrossed. For instance, noticing a drop in my concentration powers, I took the Stroop Test Flash game. It’s a simple game where you have to match the text color with the color of the ball. But this simple game also tells you if your focus starts to flag.

Games by their very nature call for a lot of co-ordination and mental skills. Take a game like Tetris or the classic Simon Says and you can “˜reverse engineer’ it as a game for brain exercise. Search among our games apps and you are sure to find many more that can be used to jog the brain. Apart from games there are many more ways to enhance brain fitness online. Tell us about your favorite fun brain games.

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Microsoft Powerpoint is an immensely powerful suite, and can be used for much more than straightforward presentations. It can be used to create website mockups, and even interactive learning tools.

We’ll explore one example of this last category below; interactive quizzes. De facto applications that employ a functional, if simple, interface.

Masters

A slide master is the DNA that is used to create new slides. A slide stamp, so to speak, which determines how newly created slides will look. By default, the slide master is pretty boring, but we can change this to pretty much anything we want. We can even create multiple master slides with sub-layouts and change between them on the fly while we’re creating our presentation.

To open the Slide Master menu, go to View and select Slide Master. This changes the Powerpoint mode, so you’ll have to switch this back to normal before you’re able to actually create the presentation.

A Slide Master menu will be added to the top ribbon which you can use to add new master profiles and layouts. These will appear in the sidebar, as shown in the screenshot below. Slide Masters will appear independently and branch off into different layouts.

Layering

So how exactly are we planning to use the Slide Masters in our little quiz? We can use them to design different, recurring levels of the application, e.g. a main menu and different quiz categories.

Using Slide Masters, we have to create the layout once, and can retain the category buttons in all subsequent slides. This will save us a lot of work now, and whenever we want to create an interactive presentation in the future.

Important! To make sure our quizzers won’t be able to advance by simply clicking elsewhere on the slide, you’ll have to disable the ‘Advance Slide on Mouse Click‘ option for every single Slide Master.

Button Actions

Buttons, much like in real applications and websites, allow us to navigate between different slides more freely than in the default linear matter. We can jump to and fro different slides, and even create clickable categories in our Slide Master.

Interlinking

It’s rather easy to link to a different slide. Select a piece of text or a shape with your right mouse, and click Hyperlink.

By default, this option allows you to link to a webpage. Select ‘Place in This Document’ in the left sidebar. This will allow for inter-presentation linking.

Hyperlinks allow you to create relative (e.g. next, previous slide) and absolute hyperlinks (i.e. pointing to a specific slide). We’ll be using both.

Creating The Quiz

We’re using the above two tools to create an interactive quiz.

First, create as many actual slides as you have categories. These don’t need to contain much, except maybe a text element for easy reference.

Masters & Categories

We’ll lay out the foundation, second. Select the first layout and design it to incorporate the major elements of your interface. These need to be consistent over the entire Powerpoint. I added the quiz title and links to every category. Point the category buttons to those slides you created before using a hyperlink.

If you want a custom design for each quiz category, copy and paste the layout as many times as you have categories. You can now adjust each layout as you see fit; the buttons will remain in working order. I created a colored text-box, matching the colors of my category buttons. Renaming them, also possible via right-click, will improve the overview.

Landing Pages & Sub-pages

Go back to normal mode, and put a new slide at the very start of your presentation. This will be your main landing page, which you can use to give advance information, point to the different categories, or initiate the quiz. Adjust it as you deem appropriate.

You can change the layout of the existing category pages by using right-mouse -> Layout and selecting one of the designs you made earlier on.

Subsequent slides can be added using the right layout by selecting them from the dropdown box below the New Slide button.

We’ve now got almost everything set to create our quiz. Simply add one additional slide to the end of your document. This will be the slide people get to see when they select the wrong answer. Make it universal, so do not relate to any one question. Add a button below that the user can click to return to the question(e.g. Try Again, or Go Back), but instead of creating a hyperlink, select Insert -> Action -> Hyperlink to: -> Last Slide Viewed.

A Quizzical Questionnaire

Make sure the questions appear per category and in running order. This allows us to use relative links.

Now, to add a question, create a page using the right categoric lay-out. Add as many additional media as you deem appropriate and as many possible questions as you feel like. All but one of these answers need to point to your wrong answer-slide with a hyperlink. The correct answer links to the next slide in sequence.

Do you know any other great uses for Powerpoint? Let us know in the comments!

But in reality, things are not as simple as they are on paper. There are many factors to consider in building a web-based education site. One of the hindrances is the difficulties in creating assessments. The free and easy methods to build customized puzzles and quizzes are extremely rare. But I’m lucky to encounter one called Hot Potatoes.

The Potatoes Are Hot

Hot Potatoes is a free multi-platform quiz creation software that can be run under Windows, Linux (with Wine) and Mac (Java version). The latest version is version 6. Unfortunately it’s no longer supported by the developer. Users are advised to visit the discussion group instead. While the interface might be a little uninformative, I personally think that most everyday users will need no technical support as using Hot Potatoes is fairly simple.

The main interface consists of links to six tools: five types of quiz makers (JCloze, Jquiz, JCross, JMatch and JMix) and one tool to combine them (The Masher).

When you start Hot Potatoes for the first time, the app will ask you to provide a user name to register the app. The user name will be used as the author name for all the quizzes that you are going to create.

The best way to understand how Hot Potatoes works is by using it in real life. For example, if you want to make a cloze test (a test where the test taker should supply the removed words from the text), you can use JCloze to do it.

Click the JCloze link from the main interface, give the test a name and provide a reading text. Block words or phrases that you want to remove, click the “Make Gap” button and provide clues and alternative answers.

After you have finished covering all the words that you want to remove from the text, export the file as an HTML version 6 page using “File – Export – Create Standard V6 page“.

Hot Potatoes will ask you whether you want to view the result using your default browser. If you do, the HTML file will be opened by the browser.

There’s also a multiple choice test builder (JQuiz). This one is flexible enough to allow more than one answer. Make a check to the box(es) next to the correct answer(s).

Using the same export menu, you can create the HTML version of the quiz.

Click on the other links in the main window to access other type of quiz builders: JMatch creates matching exercises, JMix deals with jumbled items, and JCross is the master of crossword puzzles.

Creating A Crossword Puzzle

A crossword puzzle is the type of quiz which is also popular among non-students. You can add crossword puzzles on your websites to entertain your visitors.

To build one, click on JCross and then put the letters into their respective locations.

Then click the “Show Clues Window” button and write down the necessary clues for each word.

You can adjust the size of the puzzle by going to the “Manage – Resize” menu. Another available action that you can take from the “Manage” menu is to “Create Grid from List of Words“.

This action will help users to create a crossword puzzle without having to think about the placement of the words.

Whatever the building method that you choose (manual or automatic), this is more or less what the end result will look like.

The Masher

The Masher is different from its siblings. The function of this tool is not to create quizzes, but to compile them into one group.

To start, click the “Add” button and build your collection of quizzes. You can re-arrange the order of the quizzes using the Up/Down button.

Masher will only accept files which are built using one of Hot Potatoes’ tools.

The file will be added directly to the group after you click “OK” in the confirmation window.

As a bonus, the Masher gives you the ability to customize the look of the end result. All of the options are under the “Appearance” tab.

You can add individual quizzes or groups of quizzes to your website by uploading them directly to your server. You don’t have to modify anything as everything is already in HTML. But if you are a CSS whiz, you could give the quizzes a little makeover if you want to.

Hot Potatoes might not look pretty, but it gets the job done. So whether you are creating exercises for your class, building educational websites, or just adding some fun quizzes for your visitors, Hot Potatoes might be able to help you.

If you know and use other alternative free applications to build educational exercises and quizzes, please share your knowledge using the comments below. It’s always nice to have options.