How I Built a Real-Time Quiz Platform with Next.js, WebSockets, and Learning Science

Mahesh Dhiman Posted on May 30 • Originally published at quizotic.live How I Built a Real-Time Quiz Platform with Next.js, WebSockets, and Learning Science # nextjs # websocket # typescript # edtech How I Built a Real-Time Quiz Platform with Next.js, WebSockets, and Learning Science A good live quiz has two jobs. First, it should make a room feel awake. Participants join quickly, tap answers from their phones, see feedback, and feel the tension of a leaderboard moving in real time. Second, it should help the teacher or trainer understand what actually happened. Did learners only remember terms? Could they apply the idea? Were they confidently wrong? Which question exposed the misconception? Quizotic is my attempt to combine those two jobs in one free platform: live quizzes, interactive presentations, AI question generation, 19 slide types, realtime leaderboards, and reports grounded in Bloom's Taxonomy. This is a look at how I built it with Next.js 15, TypeScript, Prisma, PostgreSQL on Railway, Socket.IO/WebSockets, and a small learning-science layer that sits inside the quiz model instead of being bolted on at the end. The problem with existing quiz tools Most quiz tools optimize for energy. That is useful. A fast leaderboard can turn a quiet classroom into a competitive one in seconds. But after the session ends, many tools leave the teacher with a shallow artifact: a score, a percentage, and maybe a question-by-question breakdown. That tells you who won. It does not always tell you what kind of thinking was tested. For a trainer, that gap matters. A compliance session where everyone scores 90% on recall questions is not the same as a session where people can apply a policy to a messy case. A math quiz full of formula recognition is not the same as one that asks students to choose a method, explain a pattern, or evaluate an approach. That is why Quizotic treats every question as both an interaction and a diagnostic object. A question can be scored, timed, tag