Have a meeting to run? When Zoom gets tiresome or you’re trying to build a team online, finding a way to connect the people in the boxes is important.
Four students from the Human-Centered Design course taught last spring at The Claremont Colleges’ Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity—popularly known as the Hive—spent the summer creating icebreakers for the Zoom age
The result is the Screen Breakers website at meltbreakshatter.com, where anyone can search for icebreakers with names like Shakedown, Fail Test and Lemonade. At Pomona, Orientation leaders introduced the activities to new students as a way to begin to create community among people who have never met in person. The site’s creators hoped faculty and people beyond campus will use them as well.
“We realized that Orientation was such a big part of our first-year experience; so our idea was: What if you introduced Orientation to every class?” says Yurie Muramatsu ’22, the project leader on a team with website designer Abdul Ajeigbe ’22, Riley Knowles PZ ’22 and Eda Topuz CMC ’22.