For this week’s Phun Phriday post, I want to call your attention to the Mental Floss Quizzes page. Some people may not label taking a quiz as particularly fun, but I enjoy stressing myself over these quick brain challenges. My latest obsession is “Finish the Country Names,” which I still haven’t managed to complete. Despite the efforts of my extremely demanding college geography professors, there are still apparently some countries that I’ve never heard of (Burkina Faso?) or can’t spell (Bosnia Herzegovina). Right now I’m at 35/48, but I’m determined to get all of them! This is my way of challenging my growth mindset…
Well, it’s Phun Phriday again. Once a week I post something that has pretty much no educational value, but somehow struck me as interesting during the week. This week’s post is about an app called, “Stop.”
My daughter likes to turn me on to apps that are trending with her and her friends. “You probably haven’t heard of it yet, but you’re going to hear about it soon,” is the way she usually prefaces these announcements.
Stop is a free trivia app available on iOS and Android. The game is rated for 12+. When you play, you can choose to play someone you know or a random opponent in cyberspace, which is one reason you might not want to introduce the app to younger students.
To start a game, the app randomly selects categories for you. You can use points to change the categories if you want. Some sample categories are: “Things you can’t bring on a plane,” “Things that you hide,” or, “My boss is…”
You then spin for a letter. Again, you can use points to spin again if you don’t like the letter. Once your letter is chosen, you must try to name something in each category that begins with that letter. When finished, you pull down the “Stop” bar. The ending time is the amount of time your opponent is given to answer the same categories with the same letters.
You can receive no points, half points (if it’s spelled incorrectly), full points, or extra points (if it’s a rare word). Whoever scores the most points on that group of categories wins the round. Then your opponent begins play for the next round, sending the categories he or she selected, along with the letter and time limit, to you.
Some people have the strategy to just answer one question and pull the Stop bar down, giving their opponents only a few seconds to try to beat their answer (which you won’t see until after your turn is over). You don’t know how much time you will have if you are the 2nd person to play that round.
As my daughter predicted, I love the game. I am absolutely terrible at it, but I keep playing – sometimes just to make my daughter laugh with the horrible answers I enter 🙂
When I saw the video, 27 Fun Facts About Fun, on the Mental Floss YouTube channel, I knew right away that it was destined to make its way into one of my Phun Phriday posts. With a little over 8 minutes of trivia about everything from mini-golf to hula hoops, host John Green presents all of the information that you never knew you wanted to know about fun. The most surprising thing I learned? That kickball rules used to allow for 14 people to stand on the one and only base at a time. That must have been a really large base…
