PowerPoint 2013: Make and Play Your Own Jeopardy Trivia Game
Getting Started
Before you dive into creating your game board, you’ll want to write down the categories, point values and questions for your game. This will make the process of creating your game go more smoothly.
Once you have your game planned out, you can hop into PowerPoint 2013. Start by creating a blank presentation. On the Design tab pick a theme you like for your game board. On the first, slide delete the Title and subtitle text boxes.
On the Insert menu, click Table and insert a table that will have enough cells to hold your point values and a row for your header. In my example game I’m going to have six categories and five questions per category. Thus I’d create a six by six table.
Click on your table and select the Design tab under Table Tools. Select a theme for your table if desired. Next, click the Layout tab under Table Tools and select the Align button. Select Align Center and then Align Middle to center the table. You should have something like Figure 1.
Now, enter your categories and point values in the table. When you’re done you should have something like Figure 2.
Questions and Answers
Let’s start by adding a question and answer slide. Start by creating a single slide. Remove the content text box and resize the Title text box so it takes up most of the slide.
On the first slide, write down your Question and on the next slide write the Answer. As you can see in Figure 3, I have my main game board, a question slide and an answer slide. Remember that in PowerPoint you can easily add in pictures or other types of multimedia to spice up the game a bit.
Links and Navigation
Now comes the fun part. We get to add in the links. We will use a hyperlink on the main game board and on each answer board to navigate through the game.
Click on the game board and highlight the point value for the question you are going to link to. Click the Insert tab and select Hyperlink. In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, click “Place in this document.” Expand the Slide Title’s heading and select your first question slide (Figure 4). Click OK. Note that your point value should now show a different color and be underlined, indicating it is a hyperlink.
Next, we need a way for people to get back to the main game board. Click on the Answer slide. Click the Insert menu and select Shapes. Select an arrow and draw it on the Answer slide. Rotate it if desired. Next, we will make the shape a hyperlink to take us back to the main game board when clicked.
Following the same procedure as before we’ll select the shape, click Hyperlink under the Insert menu and create the hyperlink to take us back to the main game board when clicked (Figure 5).
Rinse, Repeat and Test
Verify your game board works with the single question and answer. Hit F5 to enter slide show mode. Click your point value that is linked and verify it takes you to the proper question. Click the mouse and you should see your answer. Next, click the arrow to verify you are taken back to the main game board.
Assuming everything works as it should you can now create slides for each question and answer you have in your game. The easiest way to do this is to select both your question and answer slides, right click and select “Duplicate Slide” – this will create a copy of both question and answer. Repeat this for each question you have. This way you won’t need to recreate the arrow shape and hyperlink on each answer slide.
Fill in all of your remaining slides, add in the hyperlinks from the main menu and be sure to test each question and answer before you try out the game for real. It’ll take a little bit of elbow grease but you should have a fully functional game when you’re done. Get creative and have fun!
If you need a little help getting started, download this starter template: Jeopardy PowerPoint Template
