Setting Up a Large Scale Kahoot

January 6th, 2017





The Kahoot Logo in blue.

For ASB, I’ve been looking into how I might set up a large scale(I mean like 1000+ players or most of my school) Kahoot game. After looking up a number of things, “Kahoot max number of players” ended up leading me to This Page.

The following is an attempt to sum up what I’ve learned about the setup.

  1. What Is the Max Number of Players You Can Host On One Game?
    • The max number of players you can host on one Kahoot game really depends on your network. You can test if you have a good enough network to host a Kahoot game on their test page. This, unfortunately, won’t tell you what the max number you can host is though. That depends on your network speed. You can test it at Speedtest.net or any other speed test site. Once you have that Kahoot has provided the following chart for max players your network connection can support:- 10 players / 1 Mbit
      – 20 players / 2 Mbits
      – 50 players / 3 Mbits
      – 100 players / 5 Mbits
      – 200 players / 10 Mbits
      – 500 players / 23 Mbits
      – 1000 players / 45 Mbits
    • Perfect. My school has around a 200-300mpbs connection, it’ll just be a matter of finding a computer that can handle that kind of internet usage, as the laptop we usually use(mine) is probably not suited to that kind of load. According to Kahoot, the absolute max limit on players is 4000.
    • It should be noted that since writing this post, Kahoot has unfortunately since limited their max player counts to the following:
      • Basic / “Free” – 10 Players
      • Standard         –  20 Players
      • Pro                    – 50 Players
      • Premium         – 2000 Players
      • Premium Plus – 2000 Players
  2. What do I need to do in order to prepare?
    • Contacting Kahoot:
      • The first thing to do once you finalize your plans is to contact Kahoot if you are going to be hosting a game with more than 1000 players. I found this kind of difficult as according to their page,  you just have to “log in to your account and use the “Support” button in the top navbar”. Apparently, this is referenced in several places, and I’m not the only one confused… Eventually, however, I figured out that you can get email support from Kahoot by clicking the “Ask us a question” after clicking “Help” on http://getkahoot.com. After that, I asked what was needed for a large scale Kahoot and they responded with the following request:
        • – What’s the name of the event?
          – What date & time do you plan to use Kahoot! at the event?
          – What is the most participants you expect to have in a single Kahoot?
          – Where will the event be hosted?
      • They responded and let me know we were on for the 10th.
    • Contacting District IT:
      • Next, I had to contact our district’s IT Director to ask him if he thought we could support it (this really should have gone before contacting Kahoot but I figured it wouldn’t be an issue…)
      • He said the following:

        “It could work, but it would be risky… Let me know how it works out if you decide to do it? Good luck!”

      • In other words, if we take down the wifi with our game, that’s unfortunate. Great, I’ll take that as a yes!
    • Procure a Better Computer:
      • This one’s still in progress as I write this, but I have a feeling the 4-year-old laptop I’m using to write this isn’t going to support my whole school(though it has in the past for other things…).
      • I may have to end up running it on a laptop but we’ll see how it goes.
      • I ended up bringing in my own desktop for this, wiring ethernet and wifi to it, and on the day of the test was able to achieve a pretty decent down speed.
  3. Merch (Prizes…)
    • T-Shirts:
      • I contacted Kahoot’s PD department about the possibility of getting official Kahoot T-Shirts, and a little later, I got a response saying they would love to send us “goodies”!
      • The only thing was that they were running low on supply and for logistical reasons wouldn’t be sending the shirts until closer to the event dates.
      • This was fine, I figured we’d get them in time and have some super rare Kahoot t-shirts.
      • They came 2 days later but all of them were the “teacher of awesome” variety…
      • This ended up being OK because we gave them out to teachers and they enjoyed them.
      • UPDATE: I don’t think they still offer free t-shirts anymore 🙁
  4. Game Day:
    • Setup:
      • Fixed the possible bottleneck despite being told that the max we could go was 100mbps down, we somehow ended up with 400?
      • We set up everything and then had to move it because the display cord didn’t reach the projectors…
      • I eventually got everything situated and ran the test Kahoot without issues, I was actually having issues with the extension “LastPass”, as for some reason it was blocking Kahoot in some way. I disabled it for the game.
      • From there it was just time to wait for the game!
    • Execution:
      • The game ended up going pretty smoothly.
      • I wasn’t able to keep up with the influx of names that soon flooded the Kahoot but I deleted as many inappropriate names as I could and the names went by fast enough that it didn’t stop for too long on any one bad name.
  5. Conclusion
    • This game ended up being a blast! It was the largest game anyone in our area had tried but it was cool to see how well it performed despite the network strain.

Comments

One thought on "Setting Up a Large Scale Kahoot"

  1. Anna says:

    2112173

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *