Virtual Icebreaker Activity for Online Teams: Curiosity Ping Pong
Virtual Icebreaker Activity for Online Teams: Curiosity Ping Pong is a relationship mapping exercise that helps participants build useful connections and understand how people, roles, or ideas relate.
How to run it
- Pose a question to your group, eg What is something strange you believed as a child?
- Ask each person to briefly write their response into the Chatroom, but not hit the Enter key.
- When ready, invite your group to hit the Enter key at the same time to populate the Chatroom simultaneously with their responses.
- Allow up to a minute for your group to scan the many responses.
- Invite a volunteer to choose one response they are curious to learn more about and ask its author to describe the story behind it.
- When this person has shared (audibly,) ask them to choose another response that they are curious about and invite its author to share their story, and so on.
- If a nominated person chooses not to share, simply ask the current volunteer to pick another response they are curious about.
- Curiosity Ping Pong Virtual icebreaker activity to spark curious conversations.
- As a virtual icebreaker activity, Curiosity Ping Pong cleverly combines chat features with verbal sharing, making it perfect for hybrid and remote teams.
Run this exercise live
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What participants need now
Materials:
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Prompts to use +
Ask each person to briefly write their response into the Chatroom, but not hit the Enter key.
When ready, invite your group to hit the Enter key at the same time to populate the Chatroom simultaneously with their responses.
Allow up to a minute for your group to scan the many responses.
Invite a volunteer to choose one response they are curious to learn more about and ask its author to describe the story behind it.
When this person has shared (audibly,) ask them to choose another response that they are curious about and invite its author to share their story, and so on.
If a nominated person chooses not to share, simply ask the current volunteer to pick another response they are curious about.
Run this with your AI assistant +
Works with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or your own local model: paste this prompt and your AI will co-facilitate this exercise with you.
Adapt this exercise for my exact room. Exercise: Virtual Icebreaker Activity for Online Teams: Curiosity Ping Pong. Readiness: Publishable Draft. Core moves: Ask each person to briefly write their response into the Chatroom, but not hit the Enter key.; When ready, invite your group to hit the Enter key at the same time to populate the Chatroom simultaneously with their responses.; Allow up to a minute for your group to scan the many responses.; Invite a volunteer to choose one response they are curious to learn more about and ask its author to describe the story behind it.. Return a concise facilitator script with timing, wording, safety notes, and remote/in-person adjustments.
Origin unverified
- Where we observed it: The strongest current observations come from Playmeo; aggregators are listed as additional observations, not origin proof. (1 source observed, including Playmeo.)
- What that means: we track where an exercise has been observed in public sources. We do not claim to know who created it, or how popular it is.
- No efficacy claims: appearing in this library is not a claim that the exercise is proven effective. Facilitator judgment and context decide whether it works for a given room.
- Corrections: if you have evidence of an earlier or more accurate source, read our methodology and trust boundary and tell us.