Kahoot! Dynamic Question Times

The Times are Changing

Hi! My name’s Adam and I’m a front end developer at Kahoot!. There’s been some changes we’ve made to the platform that we hope you’ll enjoy. Those familiar with Kahoot! will know that the chance you have to read each question before answering in a kahoot has been five seconds.

While that’s great for some, it’s not always the right length of time. Not just for players who are competing but also the host reading the questions aloud. So, as a first step to improving the play and learning experiences of kahoots we are introducing dynamic question times.

This means that the time to read the question will now be a minimum of five seconds and the length or complexity of the question will determine the length of time given to read it.

You may wonder how we decided on the amount of time given for each answer. We looked into some research related to reading speeds and settled for an average reading speed of 180 words per minute. We also took into account the average number of letters per word, which is between 4–5, at least in the English language.

Using these two values, we decided to assign a millisecond to each character in the kahoot question, with special characters and symbols being given a slightly heavier weight, since a player may need additional time to process their meanings, e.g. π.

If that time is greater than five seconds we’ll use it for that question, otherwise we’ll use our classic five second timer.

We believe this will give players and the host more of a chance to read the question fully and give those players who struggle to read the longer questions a better opportunity to answer and compete with others.

As mentioned, this is a first step and we have many other ideas around making kahoots much fairer and fun. If you have any thoughts, opinions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know what you think.