Real Python: Build a Quiz Application With Python

In this tutorial, you’ll build a Python quiz application for the terminal. The word quiz was first used in 1781 to mean eccentric person. Nowadays, it’s mostly used to describe short tests of trivia or expert knowledge with questions like the following:

When was the first known use of the word quiz?

By following along in this step-by-step project, you’ll build an application that can test a person’s expertise on a range of topics. You can use this project to strengthen your own knowledge or to challenge your friends to a fun battle of wits.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

• Interact with the user in the terminal
• Improve the usability of your application
• Refactor your application to continuously improve it
• Store data in dedicated data files

The quiz application is a comprehensive project for anyone comfortable with the basics of Python. Throughout the tutorial, you’ll get all the code you need in separate, bite-size steps. You can also find the full source code of the application by clicking on the link below:

Whether you’re an eccentric person or not, read on to learn how to create your own quiz.

Demo: Your Python Quiz Application

In this step-by-step project, you’ll build a terminal application that can quiz you and your friends on a range of topics:

You first choose a topic for your questions. Then, for each question, you’ll choose an answer from a set of alternatives. Some questions may have multiple correct answers. You can access a hint to help you along the way. After answering a question, you’ll read an explanation that can provide more context for the answer.

Project Overview

You’ll start by creating a basic Python quiz application that’s only capable of asking a question, collecting an answer, and checking whether the answer is correct. From there, you’ll add more and more features in order to make your app more interesting, user-friendly, and fun.

You’ll build the quiz application iteratively by going through the following steps:

1. Create a basic application that can ask multiple-choice questions.
2. Make the app more user-friendly by improving how it looks and how it handles user errors.
3. Refactor the code to use functions.
4. Separate question data from source code by storing questions in a dedicated data file.
5. Expand the app to handle multiple correct answers, give hints, and provide explanations.
6. Add interest by supporting different quiz topics to choose from.

As you follow along, you’ll gain experience in starting with a small script and expanding it. This is an important skill in and of itself. Your favorite program, app, or game probably started as a small proof of concept that later grew into what it is today.

Prerequisites

In this tutorial, you’ll build a quiz application using Python’s basic building blocks. While working through the steps, it’s helpful if you’re comfortable with the following concepts:

• Reading input from the user at the terminal
• Organizing data in structures like lists, tuples, and dictionaries
• Using if statements to check different conditions
• Repeating actions with for and while loops
• Encapsulating code with functions

If you’re not confident in your knowledge of these prerequisites, then that’s okay too! In fact, going through this tutorial will help you practice these concepts. You can always stop and review the resources linked above if you get stuck.

Step 1: Ask Questions

In this step, you’ll learn how to create a program that can ask questions and check answers. This will be the foundation of your quiz application, which you’ll improve upon in the rest of the tutorial. At the end of this step, your program will look like this:

Your program will be able to ask questions and check answers. This version includes the basic functionality that you need, but you’ll add more functionality in later steps. If you prefer, then you can download the source code as it’ll look when you’re done with this step by clicking the link below and entering the source_code_step_1 directory: