Hunting the Elements Cafés

Name That Element! Trivia

Get the guests at your café fired up with a little friendly competition.

A “Name That Element!” quiz could be the headline event at your café, or combine a contest with a speaker and topic discussion of your choice.

Below are tips for running the contest as well as a list of 30 “mystery elements” and clues from which you can draw. Feel free, however, to craft whatever format works best for your café and create your own unique set of “mystery elements.”

Tips for Running a Contest:

• Quiz can be played by individuals or by small teams (2-4 people).
• If you have a large group of contestants, you may want to run the quiz in rounds. Have subsets of teams compete in each round, then have the winning teams compete in a “finals” round.
• Have teams write their answers on erasable whiteboards.
• Have an official judge or panel of judges to rule on winning answers and keep score.
• Award points either for the first correct answers (a matter of speed), or give all contestants ample time to write answers that they keep hidden until judging time. With the latter, you may need a list of particularly challenging questions for tiebreakers.
• The list below includes four possible answers for each mystery element. To make the contest more challenging, do not provide these options.
• The list below provides an initial question followed by four clues. You can opt to ask only one question, or you can reveal/read multiple clues.