Create a dynamic talk
You prepare the questions. The audience chooses which ones get asked. With each vote, their choices trace a path through a tree.
How it works, in three steps
An interview-style talk where the audience holds the thread. Here, an imaginary interview with Marie Curie.
1
You prepare
Three themes and about twenty questions, written before the event.
2
The trunk sets the stage
The host asks the guest four questions. You can skip this step and use only the audience Q&A. It can also serve, depending on how your event is set up, to introduce round-table speakers, the different stages, and so on.
3
The audience chooses
At each stage, two questions. The room votes, yellow or blue.
The common trunk
Four questions to start together
Before any vote, the host asks the guest four questions.
They put the whole room on the same page. The guest lays out their thinking, and the audience gets into the topic.
With each question, the blue tit climbs one hollow up the trunk. Once it reaches the top, it flies off into the leaves: now it’s the audience’s turn.
The blue tit waits in the first hollow.
The vote
Yellow or blue: the room decides
Everyone gets two cards, one yellow and one blue. No phones, no app to install.
- Two questions appear on screen, one yellow and one blue.
- Everyone raises the card for the question they want to hear.
- The host looks at the room and confirms the majority color with a single key.
- The blue tit flies to the chosen olive. The guest answers.
One of the two questions stays in the same theme, the other switches. The audience decides whether to dig deeper or go somewhere else.
At the end
Each group traces its own path
After the last vote, the tree shows the path of the evening, olive by olive. The blue tit sings.
With the same tree, another audience would have taken other branches. And heard a different talk.
If there’s time left, the host draws a bonus question from the ones that weren’t asked. And a PDF keeps a record of every session.
A path that goes through all three themes.
Before the event
Prepare your questions ahead of time
Choose your tree, name your themes, write your questions. A preview shows each question exactly as it will be projected. You can send out a form before the talk to collect questions from the audience.
Your tree is saved in a file. You can keep it, edit it, or lend it to someone.
Two trees
The olive tree and its blue tit, 3 themes. The oak and its squirrel, 4 themes.
No internet
Nothing gets sent anywhere. No account, no tracking.
For every format
Talks, workshops, classrooms, debates among friends.
Free and open
Download the tree
The file is hosted on GitHub, a site where people share free software. No need to go there: the button downloads it directly.
- Click the tree or “Download”: the arbre-a-questions.html file lands on your computer.
- Double-click it: it opens right in your browser.
- Choose your tree, write your questions: you’re ready.
Nothing to install, no account to create. It all fits in a single file. It works on Mac and PC, and even offline on the big day. It’s available in seven languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch.
Curious about the code or the full user guide? See the project on GitHub
The tree keeps growing
Share your ideas
The tool gets better the more people use it. An idea, a question, a bug? Write to me.
The Question Tree is a Moodstep creation · Code and drawings under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license