Every quiz you have ever played works forwards: here is a question, find the answer. Gimkit What Is mode (the “What Is…” game) runs the film backwards. You are shown the answer first, and your job is to work out what the question must have been. It is the Jeopardy instinct, answer in search of a question, rebuilt as a fast classroom game, and it turns out to be a far sterner test of understanding than the forward version ever was.
That reversal sounds like a gimmick until you play it. Forward trivia lets students survive on recognition: the right answer looks familiar, so they pick it. Backwards trivia removes the safety net entirely. Shown “photosynthesis,” you cannot nod along; you have to reconstruct what question this answers, judge which of its possible questions the game is asking, and say so fast. Recall becomes reasoning. This guide explains how What Is mode works, how to get good at thinking backwards, and why teachers quietly consider it one of the smartest formats on the platform.
what is game mode gimkit
The What Is game mode in Gimkit takes the material of a standard kit and inverts the presentation. Instead of the familiar question-then-answer flow, each round presents an answer term, fact, or statement, and the player’s challenge is to identify the matching question: the prompt that this answer correctly responds to.
A round, from the player’s seat, feels like this:
- The answer appears. A term, name, date, definition, or result is displayed: the thing that would normally be the end of a trivia exchange is now the beginning.
- You reconstruct the question. Before choosing anything, your brain does new work: what is this the answer to? A term can answer many possible questions (“What is the capital of France?” versus “Where is the Eiffel Tower?”), and the mode lives in those forks.
- Precision beats familiarity. Forward quizzes forgive fuzzy knowledge because the correct option is sitting there glowing with familiarity. Here, fuzziness collapses: two nearby questions often share an answer, and only genuinely knowing the material tells them apart.
- Speed still counts, but second. The race element survives, so the mode stays a game and not a worksheet. But it rewards a half-second of actual thought over an instant of pure reflex, and students feel that difference immediately.
- The reveal teaches backwards too. When the correct question is shown, students who missed learn the connection in the direction they failed to build it, which is the direction future recall will need.
The net effect is a mode that uses the same kits as regular play but exercises a different muscle: not retrieval of answers, but mapping between answers and the questions they belong to. Teachers call that mapping “actually knowing the material,” and it is embarrassingly easy to complete a forward quiz without ever building it.
What Is mode belongs to Gimkit’s family of lighter, clever formats alongside Gimkit Draw That, and it makes an excellent change of pace after classic play in Gimkit Tycoon.
gimkit what is
Why does this inversion matter so much? Because it attacks the exact illusion that forward quizzes create. A student can score well on forward trivia through a stack of shallow cues: eliminating silly options, recognizing the longest answer, remembering that the teacher’s correct answers “sound like C.” None of those cues survive in What Is mode. The answer is given, naked, and the only tool left is understanding: what is this connected to, and how?
That has three classroom consequences teachers value. First, diagnosis sharpens: a student who aces forward quizzes but collapses in What Is mode does not know the material less, exactly; they know it in one direction only, which is a precise and fixable thing to learn about a class. Second, study habits change: students preparing for a What Is rematch review differently, building connections from terms outward instead of memorizing pairs, because they have felt what the mode demands. Third, confidence gets honest: nobody leaves a What Is game believing they knew things they did not, which makes the post-game review session startlingly productive.
For students, the strategy is its own little discipline:
- Name the category first. Before reconstructing anything, ask what kind of answer this is: a place, a process, a person, a date. The category cuts the possible questions by ninety percent instantly.
- Ask “what would a teacher ask?” The question is almost never exotic. Test-writers ask for definitions, causes, locations, and sequences, in roughly that order of frequency. Start there.
- Beware the twin questions. Terms with two famous questions attached (capitals versus landmarks, dates versus events) are the mode’s traps. Decide which question is being asked by looking for the answer’s most distinctive feature.
- Think aloud in pairs. What Is mode rewards articulated reasoning, and classes that let students murmur their reconstruction to a neighbor score visibly better, and learn audibly more, than silent rooms.
A worked example, backwards
Abstract praise is cheap, so here is the mode at ground level. Imagine the answer on screen is “the mitochondria.” In a forward quiz, the question (“which organelle produces most of the cell’s energy?”) does all the work and the answer arrives like a package delivery. Here, the student has to run the machinery themselves, and you can hear the possible questions queuing up: “What is the powerhouse of the cell?” (the classic, the probable intent), “Which organelle is shown in this diagram?” (possible, if the kit is visual), “What did Lynn Margulis propose was once a free-living bacterium?” (devious, unlikely, exactly the kind of fork that makes strong students grin). Choosing between those is not recall. It is judgment about the material, and judgment is the entire curriculum in miniature.
Now watch the same machinery handle a date. The answer is “1776.” The forks multiply instantly: Declaration of Independence, the obvious one; the founding of a city; a publication year; a battle. The student who only memorized “1776 = America” guesses and hopes. The student who built connections outward from the date, who knows what cluster of events shares it, narrows the field by content instead of luck. Multiply that one decision by a whole kit and you have a game that grades the quality of a student’s knowledge structure, politely, at gameshow speed, while the student believes they are merely playing.
Teachers can even play the worked example live before the first real round: put one answer on the board, let the class shout candidate questions, and argue about which the game most likely means. Two minutes of that and the entire room understands the mode better than any instructions page could teach it, because they have already done the thing once, together, out loud.
What Is mode in the classroom
Scheduling tells the story: teachers deploy What Is mode after the forward quiz, never before it, because its job is consolidation rather than introduction. A class plays the kit forward on Tuesday, wobbles through What Is on Thursday, and walks into Friday’s test with the connections built in both directions. Used that way, the mode is less a game than a diagnostic instrument with unusually good sound effects.
It is also the format most likely to be requested by strong students, precisely because it does not bore them. Forward quizzes cap out: once a student knows the answers, the game is a speed contest. Backwards play stays interesting at every level of mastery, because the forks between similar questions get subtler the more you know. Gifted students arguing about which question “the mitochondria” belongs to are having the best problem in education: an argument about the material that the teacher did not have to start.
One caution: the first round will be slower and stranger than students expect, and a class can mistake that strangeness for difficulty and disengage. Frame it in one sentence (“the answers are free today; you supply the questions”) and run a throwaway practice round before the real game, and the format clicks for almost everyone within two rounds.
Availability follows the usual pattern: featured modes rotate on the free plan and Gimkit Pro unlocks all modes, so verify What Is is in your picker before the lesson, and consult the official Gimkit Help Center for the platform’s current documentation. For the cozier judgment-based cousin, see Gimkit This or That.
Frequently asked questions
How is What Is mode different from a normal Gimkit game?
The direction is reversed. Instead of being shown a question and finding the answer, you are shown the answer and must identify the question it belongs to. The material is the same; the thinking is not.
Is What Is mode harder than regular Gimkit?
It feels harder because it is more honest. Forward quizzes reward recognition, which can masquerade as knowledge. What Is mode removes the cues and asks for genuine connections, so fuzzy understanding gets exposed, then fixed. Most classes need exactly one game to adjust to the reversed flow; by the second game, scores climb and the format stops feeling strange and starts feeling like the quiz they should have been playing all along.
What is the best strategy for What Is mode?
Classify the answer first (place, process, person, date), then reconstruct the most standard teacher-style question for it, and watch out for twin questions that share the same answer.
When should teachers use What Is mode?
After students have played the material forwards. It is a consolidation and diagnosis tool: it shows exactly which connections are one-directional and gives students the practice that repairs them.
Does What Is mode give XP and GimBucks?
It is a classic-family mode rather than a 2D mode, so it does not feed the 2D XP-and-GimBucks loop. The chain it builds runs between the questions and the answers, which is the one school actually grades.
