Internet of Things
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40 free Internet of Things trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Internet of Things is the quiet network behind everyday objects: doorbells that film the porch, thermostats that learn a routine, tags that find lost keys and factory sensors that report a fault before a machine stops. The idea is older than most people think, with students and researchers wiring up office appliances long before smartphones existed. This quiz covers the whole story. You will meet the people who named and shaped the field, the first connected gadgets, the smart home brands that made it mainstream, and the wireless standards and protocols that let small devices talk to each other. There are also questions on the security scares that showed what can go wrong when ordinary objects go online. It is pitched for curious beginners, students revising for a networking or IoT course, and makers who have built a project or two. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you guess.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US vice president had a heart implant's wireless function switched off for fear of hackers?
Dick Cheney
Dick Cheney's doctor disabled the defibrillator's wireless link in 2007, fearing an assassin could trigger a fatal heart attack.
Q 02Which kitchen appliance did John Romkey famously connect to the Internet for the 1990 Interop show?
A toaster
A toaster went online at the networking trade show thanks to John Romkey and Simon Hackett, and is often billed as the first Internet appliance.
Q 03Which wireless standard borrows its name from a 10th-century Danish king?
Bluetooth
Bluetooth began as a codename proposed by Intel's Jim Kardach, who had been reading about the Viking king Harald and his knack for uniting tribes.
Q 04Which country told parents in 2017 to destroy the internet-connected doll My Friend Cayla?
Germany
Germany's Federal Network Agency classed the talking doll as a concealed espionage device, which made owning one illegal as well as selling it.
Q 05Which video doorbell company, pitched on Shark Tank as Doorbot in 2013, was later bought by Amazon?
Ring
Ring founder Jamie Siminoff declined an investor's offer on the show, then sold the company for about $1.15 billion five years later.
Q 06Which British former Procter & Gamble brand manager coined the phrase 'Internet of Things' in 1999?
Kevin Ashton
Kevin Ashton said he preferred the wording 'Internet for things', but the earlier phrase stuck and he went on to co-found MIT's Auto-ID Center.
Q 07Which SUV was hijacked over the Internet by researchers in 2015, triggering a 1.4 million vehicle recall?
Jeep Cherokee
A Jeep Cherokee had its steering, brakes and transmission taken over by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, who could also work its radio and wipers.
Q 08The Trojan Room coffee pot, subject of the world's first webcam, sat in which university's computer lab?
Cambridge
Cambridge researchers aimed a camera at the pot in 1991 to spare colleagues a wasted trip to an empty machine; it stayed online until 2001.
Q 09Which smart thermostat maker, founded by two former Apple engineers, did Google buy for $3.2 billion in 2014?
Nest
Nest grew out of Tony Fadell's frustration with every thermostat on the market while he was building a vacation home.
Q 10Which low-power mesh protocol, built on the IEEE 802.15.4 radio standard, links many smart bulbs and home sensors?
Zigbee
Zigbee is named after the waggle dance that honey bees perform on returning to the hive. Its devices relay data through neighbours to reach distant ones.
Q 11Which voice assistant did Amazon introduce in 2014 alongside the Echo smart speaker?
Alexa
Alexa grew largely out of two acquisitions: the British question-answering system Evi and a Polish speech synthesizer named Ivona.
Q 12Which single-board computer, created to teach computing in schools, became the best-selling British computer ever?
Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi launched in 2012 and outsold every earlier British computer within four years; its low cost made it a staple of home sensor projects.
Q 13Which open-source microcontroller board, begun in 2005 as a tool for design students, is named after a bar?
Arduino
Arduino takes its name from the Bar di Re Arduino in Ivrea, Italy, where some of the project's founders used to meet.
Q 21Which addressing standard uses 128-bit addresses, enough to give every connected gadget on Earth its own?
IPv6
IPv6 was developed by the IETF because its predecessor was running out of addresses; the new space holds about 340 undecillion of them.
Q 22Which smart home standard began in 2019 as Project Connected Home over IP, backed by Amazon, Apple and Google?
Matter
Matter comes with a royalty-free software development kit, though certifying a finished product still means paying membership fees.
Q 23Which search engine, launched by John Matherly in 2009, finds webcams, routers and other Internet-connected devices?
Shodan
Shodan takes its name from a character in the System Shock video games, and its filters can lead straight to a camera's live video stream.
Q 14Which tagging technology, unlike a barcode, needs no line of sight and is implanted in pets as microchips?
RFID
RFID tags can be read while buried inside a product or under an animal's skin, so factories use them to follow cars along the assembly line.
Q 15Which wireless technology behind tap-to-pay phones works only across about four centimetres?
NFC
NFC, co-invented by NXP and Sony, also lets a phone read electronic tags and simplifies setting up other wireless connections.
Q 16Which robot vacuum, introduced by iRobot in 2002, can now map a home and obey smart speaker commands?
Roomba
Roomba models from the sixth generation on use an upward-facing camera to spot landmarks and correct the floor map they build.
Q 17Which coin-sized Apple tracker locates lost items through the crowdsourced Find My network?
AirTag
AirTag owners with a recent iPhone can home in on an item using ultra-wideband radio; the wider network was put at about a billion devices in 2021.
Q 18Which smart bulb range, first sold through the Apple Store in 2012, is now made by Signify?
Philips Hue
Philips Hue was pitched at launch as the first lighting you could control from iOS; its maker Signify is the renamed lighting division of Philips.
Q 19Which botnet of hijacked cameras and routers knocked the DNS provider Dyn offline in October 2016?
Mirai
Mirai, from the Japanese word for future, broke into gadgets by trying a table of about 60 factory-default usernames and passwords.
Q 20At which university did students wire a Coca-Cola vending machine to the ARPANET in 1982 to check stock remotely?
Carnegie Mellon
Carnegie Mellon's machine reported its inventory and whether newly loaded drinks were cold yet, and is remembered as the first ARPANET-connected appliance.
Q 24Which web service, launched in 2011, lets users write applets that tie smart home devices to online events?
IFTTT
IFTTT, an acronym of if this, then that, reached the physical world in 2012 when its applets began controlling Belkin Wemo devices.
Q 25Which lightweight publish-subscribe messaging protocol was first written in 1999 to monitor oil pipelines?
MQTT
MQTT was written by IBM's Andy Stanford-Clark and Arlen Nipper; the MQ comes from an IBM product line, where it stands for Message Queue.
Q 26Songdo, a smart city built on reclaimed land with a pneumatic waste disposal system, is in which country?
South Korea
South Korea raised Songdo on an artificial island off Incheon, southwest of Seoul, in one of the largest private real estate developments in history.
Q 27Which US state's Senate Bill 327, in force since 2020, requires connected devices to have reasonable security features?
California
California approved the bill in 2018; it tells makers to fit protection suited to a device's function and to the information it collects.
Q 28Which e-paper smartwatch became Kickstarter's most funded project in 2012 before selling its assets to Fitbit?
Pebble
Pebble, created by Eric Migicovsky, went back to Kickstarter for its colour-screen Time watches in 2015 but filed for insolvency a year later.
Q 29Which sensor, also used by phones to store a photo's correct orientation, lets a fitness tracker count steps?
Accelerometer
Accelerometer chips let a phone double as a pedometer, and a low-power coprocessor can keep counting while the main processor snoozes.
Q 30Which chip designer, bought by SoftBank in 2016, licenses the designs inside virtually all smartphones?
Arm
Arm originally stood for Acorn RISC Machine, after Acorn Computers, the British firm whose Archimedes desktops first used the chips; most now go into embedded systems.