Looking for a fun and easy way to learn more about your faith? A Catholic trivia game available to play on a smart phone, tablet or laptop might just be the answer.
It’s called Catholic Knowledge, available online at http://catholic.heritage-history.com and also as an app on the Apple and Android platforms.
Game developer Teresa Roth said she and her husband came up with the game as a way to make a wide range of knowledge about the Church available to the widest audience possible in a fun format.
Roth, who home-schooled her children for 23 years, said that some of them got involved in a Catholic knowledge bee and she and her husband came up with a short online game for them to use as a training tool. They expanded the game’s content later when she started teaching a class on Catholic civilization, and eventually decided to make it available online for others.
“Almost all Catholic catechisms, especially for teens, focus on the ‘essentials’ but there is a huge, untapped world of information about our faith that is not considered essential but is also enormously interesting,” Roth said. “Some call it ‘trivia’ but it’s so much more than that. It’s knowledge, and that’s what we hope to share with people through this game.”
Jennifer Waldyke of Simpsonville said she read about the game on a homeschooling page in August, and immediately was excited to give it a try. She has used trivia questions with religious education and confirmation classes at St. Mary Magdalene Church, and said she knew the game would be fun for her students. She and her daughter play the game together often.
“Currently we tend to play in the evening, although I also often play it on my phone when I have to wait in line or for an appointment,” she said. Some of her friends from St. Mary Magdalene have set up their own online trivia team for the game, so her scores get posted there. (“I’m at a solid bronze medal,” she said.)
Waldyke and her family belong to a homeschooling co-op called the Divine Mercy Scholars, and she said the questions will also help the team that they send to the annual diocesan Catholic Quiz Bowl, which started in 2017.
Catholic Knowledge offers two different ways to play. In “Catholic Quest” mode, players are given questions from all of the game’s categories, and level up according to how many they get correct. The five levels of difficulty range from “Postulant” to “Abbot/Abbess.”
In “Knowledge Medals” mode, players can focus on questions from a specific topic and gain medals ranging from bronze to diamond level as they answer more questions correctly.
