HQ Trivia – WISE Score & Parent Review | Screenwise

HQ Trivia

Name: Screenwise
Author: Screenwise

game2018

28%

WISE Score

A cheating app for a defunct trivia game—teaching kids to outsource thinking since 2018.

HQ Trivia

game

Everyone, 2018

28%

WISE Score

A cheating app for a defunct trivia game—teaching kids to outsource thinking since 2018.

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Screenwise Verdict

Here's the thing: HQ Trivia was a genuinely fun cultural moment in 2017-2018. Live trivia for real money, hosted by charismatic personalities, played by millions simultaneously. It was cool.

This app? This is the kid who brings a calculator to mental math competitions. The entire premise is helping you cheat at a trivia game by using AI to scrape the internet for answers. The creators literally say they made it to help friends win prize money, then decided to sell it to everyone else.

Beyond the ethical bankruptcy, it's also completely obsolete—HQ Trivia shut down in 2020. So you're looking at a cheating app for a dead game. The only value here is as a cautionary tale about shortcuts, integrity, and what happens when you optimize for winning instead of learning.

Pass.

Age Fit

The actual HQ Trivia game required users to be 17+, but honestly, this app is irrelevant now since HQ Trivia shut down in 2020. If it were still functional, it would be teaching teens to cheat for prize money—not ideal at any age.

WISE Breakdown

Wholesome

This is a cheating app designed to help users circumvent the actual HQ Trivia game by using AI to provide answers. The entire premise models dishonesty and undermines fair play. The fact that it was created by a group of friends to win prize money and then monetized makes it worse. While trivia itself is wholesome, using a helper app to cheat fundamentally isn't.

Imaginative

Zero creativity or imagination involved. The app explicitly tells users to 'pay attention to your instincts and knowledge' but then provides AI-generated answers when they're stumped. It's the opposite of imaginative thinking—it's outsourcing cognition to an algorithm. No building, exploration, or creative expression whatsoever.

Safe

The app itself appears technically safe (no inappropriate content), but it exists to help users cheat at a game that has live comments which 'may include adult references' per parent reviews. More concerning is that it's a paid app with a 'Free Credit based version' and an 'Unlimited version,' suggesting monetization of cheating behavior. The actual HQ Trivia game requires users to be 17+ according to Common Sense Media, and had significant connection issues.

Enriching

Actively anti-enriching. Instead of encouraging learning, critical thinking, or knowledge retention, it teaches kids to use AI to bypass intellectual challenges. The synopsis even admits 'it can reliably answer those difficult, obscure and random questions which may stump you'—precisely the questions that would actually teach you something. It's cognitive offloading at its worst, wrapped in the veneer of 'helping.'

Parent Info

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Why It Might Be Great

Technically demonstrates AI and web scraping capabilities if you're interested in that from a computer science perspective
Could spark a conversation about academic integrity and when it's okay to use help vs. when it's cheating
Trivia questions themselves can be educational—if you actually try to answer them yourself first

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What to Watch For

The entire premise is cheating—not exactly the life lesson you want to model
HQ Trivia shut down in 2020, so this app is functionally useless now anyway
Monetizes dishonest behavior with paid tiers for more 'help'
Teaches cognitive shortcuts instead of actual learning or knowledge retention

Conversation Starters

"Why do you think some people want to use apps like this to win games? What's the point of winning if you didn't actually know the answers?"
"If everyone used a helper app, would the game even be fun anymore?"
"When is it okay to look something up, and when does that cross into cheating?"

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