interactive quiz engines

I worked for a wonderful company for a while that sold a kids' (K-12) current events website to schools via subscription (a business model that did not turn out as fruitful as hoped). Each day we'd publish a new story based on real-world current events, along with vocabulary lessons and lots of various activities and games to reinforce reading comprehension.

One of those activities was an animated, interactive "quiz engine" - a re-usable framework used for testing that we could plug questions and answers into as needed based on the story for that day. Stories generally fit within certain categories (science, history, space, etc.), and so we built a different quiz engine for each category.

As usual, the biggest challenge on these was in keeping the file size down. Our goal was to keep them under 40k - which didn't always happen, but we were usually very close. The best part was getting to put in Easter eggs - the censors never thought to check for them, but the kids found them every time. (Go ahead - see what happens to the alien when you go into warp drive while he's flying by).