Keyboard Responses in Zoom, Etc

I work with school academic competition programs, particularly quick recall where two teams of four each compete by being the first to press a buzzer to answer a question. With the pandemic raising issues of large gatherings in close contact, I’m wondering if the events could be held online with something like Zoom, etc. At issue would be determining who responded first. Do any of these apps have a function whereby the student could press a key on the keyboard and have it recorded instantly on the screen? Not sure this would work anyway, but it would be nice to know if the function is available at all. Thanks.

Not exactly typing, but you can click on what Zoom calls reactions. Those will then show an icon overlaid on the person’s image in gallery view for everyone else to see.

No specific knowledge on my part here, but maybe you should check out the online world of Jeopardy fans. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if they knew of some solution for doing competitions like this remotely.

The easiest thing to do might be to have the players type something like their name in the chat. Players prepare before the question is asked, and all they have to do is hit the return key when they think they know an answer. Then you just go with whoever appeared to have responded first in your chat window.