IceAxe

Guess Who
Never Have I Ever

Inspiration

The inspiration behind IceAxe was born out of the common challenges faced by individuals trying to break the ice between themselves and others in a group setting. Currently, individuals tend to find themselves having difficulty interacting with people due to limited topics and similarities. We need a solution to help them connect easily and have common topics to forge meaningful first interactions.

What it does

IceAxe is a dedicated platform designed to help students connect and break the ice during events like orientation. It engages students through various interactive icebreaker games, including ‘Never Have I Ever’, ‘Controversy’ and ‘Guess Who’. These activities enable participants to learn more about one another, uncover shared interests, and foster connections more quickly and effectively.

How we built it

This Telegram bot was primarily developed using Python along with the Telebot library. To connect our Python code to the bot, we utilised the BotFather Telegram bot to obtain an API key. Since Telegram doesn’t natively offer a way to track users in a group, we integrated Supabase to simplify the process. This enabled us to efficiently track individual user responses and ensure their details can be carried over to other groups in the future.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first experience building a Telegram bot, so we were learning throughout the process. We faced challenges with some module imports due to unfamiliarity with the documentation, which led us spending a significant amount of time researching, Googling, and watching YouTube tutorials to get up to speed. As a result, less time was available for actually building the bot. Additionally, we were quite fatigued, having just completed a week-long hackathon for another project, leaving us tired before even starting this one. Another hurdle we encountered was managing and converting different data types, such as strings to JSON, which resulted in type errors during implementation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are thrilled to have developed a solution that tackles the challenges students face in building connections during orientation. By implementing engaging icebreaker games like “GuessWho”, we help participants discover more about one another and build meaningful relationships.

What we learned

We started with minimal experience in building a Telegram bot, so we had to learn everything from scratch. This involved extensive Googling and watching YouTube tutorials to understand how to set up and code specific features. It was an exciting challenge to develop features that could track user responses, enabling a more meaningful and engaging icebreaker experience while ensuring the bot functioned seamlessly.

What's next for IceAxe

We plan to expand IceAxe to cater to professionals in the workforce by incorporating profession-related questions that foster meaningful conversations and connections. Additionally, we aim to introduce a variety of new interactive games designed to help individuals learn more about one another in a fun and engaging way, further enhancing the experience of building relationships in workplace settings.