IceBreaker

Inspiration

The idea behind IceBreaker is to make it easy for people who are meeting for the first time to talk about their interests and/or dislikes and bond through this interactive process, thus “breaking the ice.” Players need to stack their phones on top of each other’s to get everyone “in sync,” i.e. to be participants of the same game, which forces players to be in close proximity with each other. The app generates discussion topics through an evaluation of each user’s input and his/her likes on Facebook. The players are given a certain amount of time to talk about each topic and provide feedback by hitting the ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ option. After everyone’s feedback is recorded, the next topic is shown and the process repeats until the topics are exhausted. In the end, the app generates a summary of by showing each topic, the feedback associated with it, and the amount of time players spent on the topic.

What it does

We have the users do a mini-survey and/or connect to Facebook so we can get a general notion of what their interests are. Once we have each user's survey results, we then sync this with other survey results by having phones stack on top of each other. The end result is one massive survey file that we feed to IBM Watson to tell us what categories are best for discussion. From there it's easy sailing!