Music Quiz

What is this technique about

The Music Quiz method is an icebreaker or a “mind-freer” where student teams will compete against each other in guessing the name or artist of a song. The songs should be popular or familiar so everybody can participate in the guessing. There are several ways to do a Music Quiz as an icebreaker in a workshop setting, which makes it easy to customize it as wanted. 

Where does it come from

Using icebreaker activities and re-energizers in the classroom effectively help to “break the ice” in various ways: Adult learners get acquainted, start conversations, build trust, and relieve tensions. They encourage participation and help to create a sense of connection and shared common understanding. They help to clear the mind, vitalize, and create enthusiasm (Chlup & Collins, 2010).

Music Quizzes are en vogue as trivia games since BBC launched its Pop Quiz on 4 July 1981 (IMDb, online).

For which purposes it is used (why in your engineering teaching)

When facilitating a workshop where students are deeply concentrated on solving a problem or developing a use case or future scenario, it is ideal to have an ice breaker or “mind freer”. The purpose of the ice breaker is to get the students to stop thinking about the workshop for a moment and do a completely different activity so that the brain can process all the information obtained so far. Here, the music quiz can be implemented because it is a fun and simple game that everybody knows and can participate in. Furthermore, it will draw the students’ attention from the workshop and affect the outcome of the workshop positively in the end.

How to use it

As previously mentioned, the Music Quiz offers many opportunities. This section will describe the most common way to conduct the music quiz. Depending on the preferred music platform, find three popular songs that everybody might be familiar with and pick a 10-20 second section of each song that are going to be played for the students. During the session, the teacher will play the predetermined section of the first song and see which team will provide the right guess of the song’s name, artist, or both. This is repeated for all other songs. Make sure to have an unequal number of songs to find a winner.