Wooclap Ice breaker activity to break the ice in your group of participants!

When a person starts a new job or joins a company or team, it is not uncommon for them to feel intimidated and reluctant to communicate. To increase cohesion and collective creativity, it is necessary to facilitate exchanges between the different participants of a group or team. Among all the available levers, the ice breaker is an ideal activity to promote team building. 

Wooclap has the solution: discover the Ice breaker feature and remove the persistent blockages of your group participants in a few clicks. Break the ice quickly and efficiently and let everyone's creativity flow through fun activities!

The ice breaker: a group activity with many advantages

Why and when to use the ice breaker exercise in a group of participants?

If it is not lacking in relevance to lead a training or a team meeting between several collaborators and colleagues, the ice breaker exercise is particularly effective in the world of teaching for a more serene classroom life. This group activity, which requires very little material, is of great interest at the beginning of a course, a year or a training session in order to establish a solid foundation of mutual trust between all the participants and to remove the blocks of each person in your groups of learners. A powerful tool for team building, the ice breaker activity creates a strong and lasting collective spirit of belonging from the very beginning, which will ensure the smooth running of future activities and discussions. 

Objective of the ice breaker activity: group cohesion at the heart of the issues 

There is no single objective for the icebreaker activity. This collaborative work has many advantages within a team or a group of participants for:

• launching a group dynamic and relax the atmosphere within the teams;
• starting to share knowledge or information between the participants and to reinforce team building;
• making the beginning of a course more lively;
• taking the temperature of each member gently;
• getting to know each person on the team or course;
• building trust between each participant;
• breaking the ice within the group and unleash the creativity of all employees. 

To organize an ice breaker workshop, teachers will have to determine the main objective they wish to achieve according to their educational project. It is also necessary to adapt to the group of participants, their experiences and their limits in order to find relevant ideas for ice breaker activities and to achieve the established objective. This work will create a more secure atmosphere where exchanges between team members will be more fluid.

What icebreaker activity should be implemented to break the ice between participants?

The ice breaker activity can take different forms:

• a debate activity within the participant group;
• an open-ended question where each person in the group expresses their idea or opinion;
• a team or individual research project such as a question and answer game between collaborators;
• a survey of team members' opinions.

The choice of activities selected for your ice breaker workshop depends largely on the theme of the course, meeting or training being conducted and the length of the session. For example, if your course is 60 minutes long, it would not be appropriate to create an ice breaker activity that is longer than 30 minutes. 

To get the ice breaker started, you can ask an initial question to assess the general mood of the group members by asking them how they feel. This will make participants feel heard and more valued. 

Follow up with a survey activity with the goal of gathering ideas from each participant, for example, "what is your favorite season?" 

Finally, ask one person in the group to stand in the middle of the class and take turns asking questions of the other participants to learn more about them.

The Wooclap ice breaker activity: strengthen the team spirit in person or remotely!

Wooclap modernizes the ice breaker activity by offering the participants of the session an interactive and playful experience. Various exercises of varying length are offered in our tool to break the ice at the beginning of the year or course or to measure the overall understanding of all group members. Among the most popular ice breakers on Wooclap are:

• the open-ended question to measure team motivation: "how do you envisage your year?" ;
• the MCQ to test the participants' knowledge: "what is the capital of France?"
• the "find on the image" activity to work on memory and help organize ideas;
• the online survey to detect the difficulties of certain participants in the group.

Download your icebreaker templates

To save time, Wooclap gives you the opportunity to download various ice breaker activity templates directly from your online account. Use the Wooclap ice breaker methods and offer your course participants an effective way to free their speech and creativity within a team.