[Note: I've updated some content since the broadcast]
Incase you don’t know, Test The Nation is a show on CBC Television that will allow you to take an IQ test and see if you’re smarter than the panel of surgeons, tattoo artists, or radio DJs.
There are two ways you can take the test. First, is online at cbc.ca/testthenation. The second is while you are watching the show by keeping track of your score on a scorecard.
Who Made It Happen at CBC.ca?
A quick glace at the credit page yields names and titles, but what exactly do these people do?
Project Management ensures that the project runs on time, meets all deadlines, co-ordinates the resources, schedules meetings, and is the link between the client and the project team members.
Platform Support is the team that I work on and provides support to the Technical Lead, Programmers, QA Team, and Design team. When things aren’t working as expected with the webservers, databases, ftp server, or mailing lists the Platform Support team is there to keep everything running smoothly.
Design Lead/Front-End Programming deals with anything that is the front-end of the site, that is, what you see and interact with. This role invovles integrating dynamic content, such as flash applications, or ajax widgets into the site. This also includes programming these applications.
The Research department takes all of the raw numbers from various sources and computes official and audited statistics for tv, radio, and cbc.ca. Their role in Test The Nation is to ensure that the data from the online IQ tests is accurate and in a format that can be digested by other departments for inclusion on TV or the website.
Copywriting is the term given to a person or department who’s role is to ensure that the text content is accurate and error-free. This includes checking spelling, grammar, and ensuring that the copy (their term for “text”) is correct.
Design, like the name says, involves designing the look and feel of the website. This includes colours, fonts, and layout. With projects that are integrated with TV there is usually a style guide to follow so that both TV and Online look unified.
Technical Lead is the person that all non-technical people go to in order to answer to their tech question. This person utilizes all of the resources at his disposal (Platform Team, IT, External Vendors) to get the answer he’s looking for. In the case for Test The Nation this person also did the back-end programming (written in Java of course).
Quality Assurance ensures that everything works properly. This includes testing the website on a multitude of platforms and browsers. As well as testing the back-end components of the site. With Test The Nation their role was to ensure that there was no bugs in both the front-end (Flash) and back-end (Java) code.
A view from the set
So How Does It Work?
The online test is a flash application that delivers the question and records your answer.
When you have completed the test data, such as: how you scored in each section, the time it took to complete the test, your demographics that you inputted at the start of the test, and your computed IQ are stored in a database.
All of the data is funneled through our Content Delivery System. Using their system, we are able to throttle the number of test responses that reach our database. This allows us to ensure that the database never goes down because it’s overloaded. If, for whatever reason, the site goes down, our CDN will queue up and test responses for later delivery when the site returns to normal.
At certain intervals during the show, the statistics department will deliver the latest results from the online IQ test.
Interesting Trends
Keeping an eye on the website traffic during events like this is always fun. Take a look at the following graph:
The red line indicates when the broadcast aired in the Atlantic region (7pm ET). As the show airs in each timezone you can see a corresponding spike in traffic. The next “blip” is eastern time. The following central, mountain, then pacific. If you were to drill down into each spike, you could see corresponding “mini spikes” during commercial breaks as people browse the site during TV commericals.
Keeping It Fun
During events like this, I like to spice things up a bit by having a pool of some sorts. A few of us in the office are making predictions as to the number of people who will do the online IQ test. Some people guess, others try to make an educated guess by using wacky formulas (like, taking the percentage of the estimated number of tv viewers) or “insider information”. Whatever the case, it will be interesting to see who won.
CBCers were able to take the IQ test before the show aired. I’m ashamed to admit that I scored an IQ of 96. I’m going to use the excuse of being distracted because I was doing the test while watching TV 
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You may be interested in the blog posts I just made regarding recent scholarly research re: the topic of national IQ and various outcome measures.
Kevin McGrew (IQ’s Corner)
One advantage of doing the online version is that it would have been more obvious that the Air Farce clip was part of the test and not just a diversion. I lost two questions and about 4 IQ points on that one.
I’m really wishing I’d stuck with my original guess right about now!
It’s too bad that on the credit list there is no mention of a content lead… The test is over. How did everyone do? what were the results? I guess the homepage will get updated once everyone just doesn’t care anymore.
sigh….
Yeah, my wife complained about the Air Farce clip, too.
Blake, do you want to take a stab at how “Christie” came to be? link
Actually, there are lots of improbablely high scores on games on CBC.ca. Is there a bug or exploit at work here?
Do you know where the CBC employee results were posted? I did the advance test (open to CBC employees only) on Friday. Communications said the results would be posted online over the weekend. I don’t see it on intranet, nor on the website.
What a disaster…the feed for the show kept cutting out with audio and picture problems. How can you complete a memory test when for 5 of the 20 seconds the “image” you need to memorize has cut to black?!!! My girlfriend and I lost interest due to the intolerable technical difficulties the show was experiencing. I hope heads rolled at CBC this morning!
Lucky you Julie G… you got to do the advanced test that was open to employees of the CBC. I’m an english employee in Montreal and guess what? The site wasn’t available from inside Radio-Canada. I asked for a reason and got the standard “we’re working on it”… I’m interested to see how my fellow Quebec CBCers faired on the test… if only if they were able to play of course.
Sunshine,
Without getting too technical, this is the reason why employees on R-C’s network couldn’t get to the advanced test.
The CBC Advanced test was put on the public website. In order to prevent non CBCers from accessing the content, a “lock” was put in place. This lock only allowed access to users who were on the CBC network (the key was your IP address).
At the time, it was assumed that the way users browsed CBC.ca on R-C’s network was through the same system that CBCers use.
We discovered that was not the case when we got complaints from users on R-Cs network. An e-mail was sent to the IT guys at R-C to get it fixed.. but as of Today I still haven’t heard back from them.
Thanks so much for the update Blake. Usually I am very proud to be one of those hybrid employees who work in both our official languages. BUT…all too often in neat initiatives like this one, someone drops the ball. I’m not blaming anyone, but it’s just frustrating to see how clumsy something that is really quite simple so quickly becomes. Thanks for the explaination…now i’m just waiting for the sour taste in my mouth to go away.
I find it interesting that people on the AEBC mailing list are complaining that the actual TV show was incomprehensible if you’re blind. Wait till they look at the accompanying Web site and find it was done in Flash, which, for all but a handful of developers, is a guaranteed path to inaccessibility.
But hey! It worked on the developers’ own computers.
Psyklops - what speed is your internet connection?
Joe Clark, whose site about accessibility is a must read, makes an excellent point. Nothing is as frustrating as visiting web sites that require the downloading of an application version that’s only about 3 hours old before you can access any content.
Attention web site developers: go for market share … and include ‘Skip Intro’ buttons.
I bet blind people don’t get much out of Dancing with the Stars, either.
I’m all for accessibility, and I actually enjoy listening to Descriptive Video every once in a while, but some things just can’t be made accessible to everyone. Visual memory and perception were substantial parts of that IQ test.
That brings up an interesting point. How are IQ tests administered for the visually impaired?
I’m sure there are other ways to test memory and perception.
All of our sites go through a QA process to ensure that it not only works on the developers’ own computers, but old machines running windows 95, or people on dial-up connections.
Adam, that wasn’t a web problem, it was a cable television broadcast problem.
Not every single thing can be accessible. However, we’re talking about one TV show and its accompanying Web site, not “everything.”
[...] the companion site is something the CBC is so proud of it got coverage on the official blog. As it was created in Flash by nonexpert developers, without even bothering to [...]