What a school should know before using Giga Quizzes

One independent developer. Giga Quizzes is not a company and has no investors, so nothing here is shaped by a quota or a renewal date, and nobody’s job depends on a school signing anything. Mail sent to [email protected] reaches one person, who reads and answers it.

It also means there is nobody to get past. A question about what the site does with a class’s answers goes to the person who wrote the code that handles them, and a school that needs something specific can ask for it directly rather than filing a ticket.

The game runs in the host’s own browser. The teacher’s device keeps the clock, marks the answers and holds the scores, and it opens an encrypted connection to each student’s device. A small server helps the devices find one another at the start; it does not run the game.

Running it is not costless — there is a relay that carries traffic on restrictive networks, a database behind every quiz and report, and storage for the images teachers upload. What those costs do not do is grow with each extra player, because the game itself runs between the devices already in the room. So there is nothing to meter and nothing to ration: no per-seat price, no player cap to unlock, no trial that expires and no paid tier.

They are covered by display advertising from Google. The Privacy Policy explains the cookies it uses and how to turn off personalised ads.

A nickname. That is the whole of it at the point of joining: a student opens the site, types the room code and a name for themselves, and plays. No email address, no password, no account and no app.

What ends up stored is that nickname and the answers they gave, inside the single report saved to the hosting teacher’s library. The report holds the final standings, how each question went across the room, and what every player answered. The teacher who hosted can open it, and deleting it deletes the stored answers with it.

How the answers travel: each student’s device connects to the teacher’s device over an encrypted WebRTC connection, the same technology video calls use. Where a network blocks a direct connection, the traffic is carried by a relay operated by Cloudflare, which forwards the encrypted packets. Getting the two devices connected in the first place means our signaling server handles the technical addressing WebRTC needs.

One practical note for a school that would rather students were not identifiable at all: a nickname is simply whatever the student types. Ask a class to use initials, a seat number or a team name and nothing in the game will ask for more — the scoring, the leaderboard and the report all work exactly the same way.

The protective part here is structural rather than contractual. Students create no account, give no email address and set no password, so there is no student login to secure and no student profile to breach. Personal information is not sold. A teacher deletes a game report and the stored answers go with it.

On formal certification the plain answer is that Giga Quizzes does not hold one: it has not been through a COPPA, FERPA or SOC 2 audit. What it offers instead is specificity — the section above says what is collected and where it goes, and the Privacy Policy sets out retention, deletion and the infrastructure providers involved.

If your district needs an agreement in place before a teacher may use a tool, write to [email protected] and say what it has to cover.

Nothing is installed; a browser is the whole requirement. What has to be reachable:

• giga-quizzes.com — the site itself, over HTTPS.
• api.giga-quizzes.com — over HTTPS and a WebSocket, for signing in, saving quizzes and joining a room.
• stun.l.google.com and stun1.l.google.com on UDP 19302 — how a device discovers how it can be reached.
• A Cloudflare TURN relay, handed out per room. This is the fallback path when a direct connection between two devices is blocked, and on a tightly filtered network it is often the only path that works for a phone on mobile data.

Allowing those is the whole of the setup. Nothing else has to be changed on a managed device, and a teacher does not need administrator rights to run a game.

Students who lose their connection rejoin and keep their score. A phone that locks itself, a laptop that hands over between access points, a student who switches to mobile data because the hall is busy — each comes back to the same room and lands on the question in progress. The largest game so far had 497 players in one room, and it ran to the last question.

The same holds for the teacher hosting it: reopening or refreshing the page returns them to the question they were on, with every score intact, and the room stays open for the class while they do.