How to study with friends using a live quiz

Studying alone has a flaw. You only see what you think you do not know. With others, a question you thought was easy stays unanswered, or one of you gives an answer the others did not have. You spot what is fragile faster, and having others around helps you stay with the session until the end.

A group quiz also has a simple advantage, it forces you to answer from memory in front of someone, which is exactly the technique that pays most. Roediger and Karpicke showed that taking a test keeps more than rereading, even though rereading feels more reassuring (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006). If you lack material to test, start with How to make flashcards that actually work to prepare your cards before the game.

Get together on the same course, with the same syllabus and the same exam date. Each person prepares their own cards before the game, otherwise the quiz mostly tests luck. Set a short length, one that leaves energy for the correction, because the game is worth what you do with it afterwards. Avoid playing too late, tiredness weighs on memory and on attention Sleep and memory, why sleeping after you study matters.

After each game, note together the questions that tripped up several people and explain them out loud. Explaining to someone helps the one who explains remember, an effect described in Does learning by teaching work? What research says about the protégé effect. Those missed questions then go into your individual reviews. Keep the competition light. A quiz where everyone plays to learn helps more than one where everyone plays to win.

Classroom quiz games have been studied a lot, mostly with Kahoot. Wang and Tahir reviewed 93 studies. Their main conclusion is that Kahoot can have a positive effect on performance, classroom dynamics, attitudes and anxiety, but some studies find little or no effect (Wang and Tahir, 2020). The result therefore depends on how it is used, not only on the tool.

The same review notes what students and teachers find difficult. Time pressure, fear of losing, answers scored by speed, which can push people to guess without thinking, and connection problems. Take two pieces of advice from it. Pick a format where nobody feels judged, and take time to discuss the answers after each question, not just to look at the ranking.

In Lumi, you start a challenge and your friends join with a 6 character code. It is played by 2 to 8 players, with 20 seconds per question, and a podium appears at the end. Nothing is to be paid and nothing is to be won, the challenge is only for quizzing each other together and seeing what you remember.

The format is short and simple. The 20 seconds push you to answer from memory rather than dig through your notes. Prepare your cards beforehand, as for the mock exam described in How to do a mock exam to study, and how to read your score, and note the missed questions to go over them alone. The app is not on the App Store yet, and the challenge will be available at launch.

Other tools make their cards playable. According to its home page read on 7 November 2026, Knowt lets you import Kahoot sets and play them with extra game options, and turn a video into live games (Knowt, 2026). If you want lots of game modes, that choice may suit you. Prices and limits of each tool are not compared here, because those pages do not give them.

Lumi’s challenge is deliberately simpler, a single format that starts fast and extends the cards you have already learned. To choose a study app for your situation, see The best study apps in 2026, ranked on five criteria, and for the method behind all this, Active recall, why quizzing yourself beats rereading. You can also play in the evening, then move on the next day to your spaced reviews, as described in Spaced repetition, how long to wait between two reviews.