Instructions on how to run a "queen bee" ice breaker exercise 🐝
The point of the Queen Bee ice breaker is to get as many people in the room talking with each other as possible.
We all know that ice breakers can be cheesey and (sometimes) boring, so the idea behind the Queen Bee is that everyone gets to choose their question of interest and crowd source answers to that question from anyone in the room. The skill is in chatting to everyone to find out their experiences and expertise so you can best identify who to ask in the future when you have questions or want to have an interesting discussion.
Everyone in the room gets into groups of three and designates someone the Queen Bee 🐝. That person asks their question (1 minute) and then their worker bees (the other two members of the group) buzz around the room asking everyone else for answers (3 minutes). When the timer goes the groups reform and the worker bees share back what they learned (2 minutes).
After the first round the next person is designated Queen Bee and the process starts again.
One motivation for running this session may be to nudge people into having particular types of conversations.
For example, if you really want members of the group to think about how to work collaboratively together in a short period of time, the facilitator could seed that as a suggested question. Alternatively if you want the community to think about actions they could take to implement change as a result of the things they learn from the workshop, the facilitator may seed that as a potential starting question.
However, the main goal of the Queen Bee ice breaker is to get people talking to each other and having fun. By putting such a strict time limit on the conversations, you should leave people wanting more so they continue to chat in coffee breaks for the rest of the event.
- Title slide above to be shown on the big screen at the beginning while you're talking
- An online timer to be shown on the big screen while people are taking part in the ice breaker
- A microphone so you can be heard over the chatter
- A buzzer or alarm that you can use to signal moving to the next activity
The title slide can be downloaded either as a powerpoint file if you'd like to edit it or a jpg image if you're happy with the standard form.
- Download
pptxhere - Download
jpghere (you need to right click and save the image from the browser to your computer)
A good online timer can be found at http://e.ggtimer.com.
- Open 3 tabs in your browser for 1 minute, 3 minutes and 2 minutes.
- When you need to switch to the next activity, just move to the appropriate tab and then click refresh to start the timer.
Don't worry too much about being exactly on time, its ok to click refresh after you've finished speaking for example, but do try to move the conversations along quickly. In the best case scenario it will be difficult to break up interesting conversations. That's the goal! You want to leave people feeling like they want to find those people again, later in the day, to chat more.
🚧 This timer could be improved by also showing the instruction along with the time on the screen. 🚧
🚧 I (Kirstie) haven't found a good website that does this, but any suggestions are very welcome! 🚧
Hopefully there will be a lot of buzz (geddit?) in the room as people are having interesting conversations so it's really important that the facilitator can be heard easily.
In order to get everyone's attention, it is useful to have a buzzer to indicate that the time is up and that everyone should move to the next activity.
You could either buy a loud buzzer or fog horn, or set up an alarm on your phone and hold that phone up to the microphone when it needs to be heard.
This is a sample script that you can use as inspiration for what to say when you're facilitating a queen bee ice breaker. Please edit as much as you'd like to make it sound like your voice!
The words in bold are those that could be emphasised for each sentence.
The example below is recommended for a data study group at the Turing Institute so it focuses on a group who are coming together for a week and who are interested in data science. The relevant parts of the script below should be changed if you're running - for example - a one day session on open science.
Good morning everyone!
One of the goals of this week is to get to know each other. So we're going to do a little ice breaker!
(Yep! A cheesy cheesy ice breaker!)
It's called the Queen Bee and the instructions are up here on the screen.
When I finish speaking (not now!) you're going to get into groups of three.
When you're in those groups give each other a number: 1, 2, 3.
(Easy so far, right?)
You're going to take it in turns (number 1 first, number 2 second etc) being the Queen Bee of your little hive.
When you're all together in your group, the Queen bee has 1 minute to ask a question.
Then, the worker bees from all of the groups go buzzing around the room to find answers to the Queen's question. The bees have 3 minutes to get the answers.
(The queen doesn't just stand around while the worker bees are finding her answers! She can go and answer other queen's questions!)
Remember that the point of this game is to meet each other so don't just chat with the first person you meet. Go and ask the same question of as many people as you can in those 3 minutes!
At the end of the 3 minutes of buzzing around the room, the hive have 2 minutes to get back together and share back the answers they learned. Hopefully they're all interesting!
At the end of those 2 minutes, the Queen Bee switches to the next person and we start from the beginning again. (1 minute to ask a question, 3 minutes to find answers in the room, 2 minutes to share back what the hive learned.)
So, the big question you're all wondering is what sorts of questions should I ask??
The answer is kinda, whatever you'd like to ask!
Probably having something data science related makes sense, but isn't required. Maybe "How do I run this particular deep learning analysis?" Or "How do I get a job as a data scientist in industry?" Or "How do I finish this darned PhD?!?"
One of the questions that I think a lot about is "How do we get a diverse group of people working together on a brand new project quickly and effectively when we only have a few days to deliver a result?" I think it's really tough to work collaboratively together so that everyone feels that they're contributing to the success of the team.
So if you want to ask questions about building a team that would be pretty fun in my opinion!
But just to reiterate, all questions are welcome!
Ok, that's enough of me talking! Go and get into your groups. Give everyone a number 1, 2, 3, and I'll start the timer for the first queen bee to ask her question.
The Queen Bee idea was proposed by Lauren Cadwallader for OpenCon Cambridge in 2017.
This repository was developed from that idea by Kirstie Whitaker for the Alan Turing Institute Data Study Group team in 2018.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This means that you can use and re-mix any of the content for any purpose so long as you acknowledge Lauren and Kirstie in whatever you create.
For example, if you make a new version of the queen bee ice breaker you should say somewhere in that project:
This work is based on the Queen Bee ice breaker instructions (https://github.com/WhitakerLab/queen-bee) by Lauren Cadwallader and Kirstie Whitaker and used under a CC-BY 4.0 license.
If you make any improvements to the ice breaker instructions, please let Kirstie know as she'd love to be able to add those enhancements to this project repository (with acknowledgement!)
You can open an issue in this github repository or email her on kwhitaker@turing.ac.uk.
Thank you!