Ice Breaker

Ice Breaker is a web application designed to allow students to ask real-time, anonymous questions during class. Once started, it allows the creation of rooms, each with its own set of keys: a private instructor key, and a public student key. Each key exposes a different view of the room; students see only a form that allows them to submit questions (optionally including a name), whereas instructors see a stream of incoming questions from students.

The envisioned use of this application is that one of the instructors (most likely a TA) monitors the instructor view during class, and asks any incoming questions by proxy. The hope is that this will lower the barrier for shyer students to ask questions during class.

Ice Breaker was designed to augment, not replace, systems like Piazza. Because of this, all Ice Breaker rooms are ephemeral: if the server is restarted, all questions and rooms are erased. To minimize the overhead of using Ice Breaker, there are also no users, no sessions, and no administration interface. Rooms are created by the first person to open them, and keys are given directly in the room URLs.

Usage

Once Ice Breaker has been deployed (see below), usage is straightforward. To create a new room, simply point your browser at $URL/room/$ROOM/$KEY. A student key ($SKEY) will be automatically generated from the instructor key, and will be shown in the instructor view. Student can now access the room using $URL/room/$ROOM/$SKEY. Other instructors can join the room by using the same URL as was used to create the room. The rooms should also be easily accessible on mobile phones.

Instructors can see all questions, whereas students can see none. Questions/notes posted by other instructors will be highlighted in the question feed, allowing basic communication between instructors. The instructor feed will automatically show new questions as they come in on most modern browsers.

Note: Since Ice Breaker deployments are not stateful, a server restart will wipe all rooms, including their keys. To prevent students from accidentally re-creating an old room with the student key as the instructor key when accessing an old URL, instructor keys cannot be on the form of student keys (eight character hex strings).

Deployment

Ice Breaker is trivial to deploy:

go install github.com/jonhoo/icebreaker
env PORT=8080 $GOPATH/bin/icebreaker

The repository also contains all the configuration files required to deploy directly to Heroku. Simply follow the steps for creating a (free) Heroku dyno, and then push to deploy. If you already have the Heroku CLI installed, you can quickly spin up an instance using:

git clone https://github.com/jonhoo/icebreaker.git
cd icebreaker
heroku create
git push heroku master
heroku open # opens the deployed install in your browser

Beware that Heroku will put your server to sleep after a certain amount of time if you are on the free tier service. This process effectively terminates the application and restarts it the next time one of its URLs are accessed, so once this happens, all room state will be wiped.