is a game show franchise that was co-created and produced by Mark Burnett, Barry Poznick and John Stevens.
[2] Therefore, the show is essentially a test to see how much an adult has retained since graduating elementary school.
The show also derives its humor by occasionally displaying the contestant's educational attainment, implying that in spite of that, they struggle to answer some questions.
Throughout the game, the contestant can choose to walk away, or in this case, "drop out of school," and leave with the current accumulated winnings up to that point.
At the end of the game, the contestant must confess to the camera whether they are "smarter than a 5th grader" or not, based on whether or not they have won the grand prize.
The syndicated version featured a reduced grand prize of $250,000 with a revised game format; unlike the original game format, the contestant must attempt to correctly answer up to ten questions with correct answers earning a certain cash value proportional to the difficulty (first-grade questions are worth the lowest amount, and fifth-grade being the highest).
On October 20, 2008, publisher THQ released the first video game, titled Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?
: Make the Grade, for the PC, PS2, Nintendo DS, Wii, and Xbox Live Arcade.
Game Time was released on October 26, 2009, for Nintendo DS, Wii and Xbox 360.
In 2015, GameMill Entertainment released a game based on the 2015 Fox Primetime revival for the Nintendo 3DS.
The base of the game is a five-reel scatter pay video slot on a four-by-five, yielding 1,024 possible winning combinations on every spin.
Answering a question correctly within three times advance the grade level and the game goes on.
In addition to the "Helper" picked at the beginning, the player can earn any of the three "cheats" by landing symbols on the primary game: