Disabling a scanner after a certain amount of time

Question

I am making a text based quiz and I want to make it so that if the player doesn't answer after a certain amount of time than it will act as if they got the question wrong. Im not really sure how to do this. I have a few ideas: Multithreading and Timers; However I have no idea how to do either.

Would either of those be good options for this?

Method with my question:

    public void questionOneA(String choice) {

    choice = scanner.nextLine();
    setWrong(false);

    switch(choice) {
    case "a":
        setLives(lives - 1);
        setWrong(true);

        if (getLives() > 0) {
            System.out.println("WRONG! Try again.");
        }
        else {
            System.out.println("WRONG!");
        }
        break;
    case "b":
        System.out.println("CORRECT!");
        setCorrect(true);
        break;
    case "c":
        setLives(lives - 1);
        setWrong(true);

        if (getLives() > 0) {
            System.out.println("WRONG! Try again.");
        }
        else {
            System.out.println("WRONG!");
        }
        break;
    case "d":
        setLives(lives - 1);
        setWrong(true);

        if (getLives() > 0) {
            System.out.println("WRONG! Try again.");
        }
        else {
            System.out.println("WRONG!");
        }
        break;
    case "skip":
        if (skips > 0) {
            setSkips(skips - 1);
            setCorrect(true);
        }

        else {
            System.err.println("You do not have any skips left!");
        }
        break;
    default:
        System.err.println("Please type an answer.");
        break;
    }
}

Answer 1

You can do it the same way you would for anything else that's based on doing something after a certain amount of time, with either a Timer or a Delta-time loop setting off an event (in this case one that corresponds to getting the question wrong) after a certain amount of (delta-)time.

Assuming your quiz runs in a loop (as games and game-like software should), then all you need to do is:

//Specify a maximum time and record it in a variable; in this case, I'm using milliseconds as unit, and 30 seconds of time.
long maxQuestionTime = 30000;

//Outside the game-loop, at start of a question, record a timestamp of the current time + max time.
long maxQuestionTimestamp = System.currentTimeMillis()+maxQuestionTime;

//Inside game-loop, check if current time has gone above the timestamp, effectively measuring elapsed time.
if(System.currentTimeMillis()>maxQuestionTimestamp){
    //fail the question here
}