How To Use Zoom's Breakout Rooms During Your Next Virtual Trivia Night

Work-from-home life can be stressful, especially given the current circumstances — but there are also some silver linings to hold onto during such uncertain times. For example, it's never been easier to conduct work meetings from your bed or couch with Zoom, and confusion over which conference room your meeting's in isn't really a problem anymore. Still, because getting used to these changes can be tricky, you'll want to know how to use Zoom's virtual breakout rooms ahead of time if you're in charge of organizing meetings or putting together your friends' next virtual trivia or game night.

Breakout rooms are a great option for Zoom meetings or game nights that need multiple sessions to be taking place at once. According to Zoom, you can have up to 50 sessions occur simultaneously in one meeting, all in their own little breakout rooms. The host of the Zoom meeting can choose to split up the participants of the meeting into separate sessions either automatically or manually, and can switch people between sessions at any time. The max number of participants in a Zoom meeting, across any number of breakout rooms, is 200.

Zoom breakout rooms can be super helpful in a number of circumstances during working hours and outside of them. For example, if you're discussing business strategies, break up into smaller groups to do some brainstorming, and then re-group with everyone else to present your group's ideas. On the other hand, you could split up every few minutes during trivia night to discuss your game plan with your team.

If you want to create breakout rooms for your Zoom meeting/game night, you have to be able to sign into your company or group's Zoom web portal as an administrator, so that you're able to edit account settings. Once you can do that, you just have to navigate to "Account Management," click on "Account Settings," and then select "Breakout Room" on the "Meeting" tab. You'll be able to see here if the setting toggle is enabled or disabled.

From there, you have a few options for how you want your Zoom breakout rooms to work. For example, you can choose to allow meeting hosts to pre-assign participants to breakout rooms, or decide whether you want to make any settings mandatory for the users in your account.

If you want to set up breakout rooms as a regular user for your own use, go to "Account Management," then click on "Settings." Again, you'll select the breakout room option on the meeting tab — from there, just switch the toggle on or off. If you're not able to switch the toggle on for breakout rooms, that means that your Zoom administrator has locked this option at either the Group or the Account level, and you'll have to contact them in order to get that privilege.

There are tons of other ways to take advantage of Zoom capabilities, whether it's for your next company-wide meeting, or your next hangout with friends. You can learn more about how to use Zoom video conferencing here.