Can a TV game show be useful?

 

TV quiz shows are popular all over the world. They are a rage on British TV for example and are broadcast 24 hours a day on all days. The act of winning substantial amounts of money by answering trivial, obscure and usually utterly useless questions from memory seems to have a mesmerizing effect on people. What if we could put this odd liking to good use?

Imagine a TV quiz show where a team of four players are asked the usual trivia questions, except that they are allowed up to 30 seconds to look for the answers on an internet search engine on a large screen visible to the audience. Correct answers accumulate 1000 pounds (or equivalent) for a session with 20 questions. So, the maximum accumulation could be 20,000 pounds! At the end of the session, a quizmaster is asked as many questions as the participants got right, with a total time limit of 30 seconds times the number of questions. For example, if the participants got 14 questions right, the quizmaster would get 7 minutes to answer another 14 questions. If she can, the participants lose all the money, if he cannot answer the stipulated number of questions in the allocated time, the participants get to share the pot and take the money home. This is modelled after a highly popular British TV show called “The Chase”.

The advantage of such a show would be that, in addition to learning the answers to trivia questions, the audience would get to see how effective searches are done. How to compute the correct search method, how to sift through the results rapidly and accurately avoiding the spam and misleading results, how to comprehend what the right search result is trying to convey and finally, how to communicate the final answer to the question from the search results.

If such a show is watched by as many and with as much attention as the mindless game shows that are so popular, we would have an effective way to improve computing, comprehension and communication skills. The three skills that people, and particularly children, need more than almost any other today.