Ice Breaker was a rather complex gradebook management program. It allowed teachers to keep track of both classes and students, and for students to look at their own grades. Unfortunately, a complete lack of planning led to the project’s untimely demise ;)

The project started back in high school when I was first learning about programming. I had a short starter class in C++ under my belt and was starting to take a look at MFC and Windows programming when my friend and I were introduced to a little console application created by one of our teachers. It was called Ice Breaker and it allowed students to look at their grades at any time, and to take little review tests.

After this initial introduction, we began talking about how much nicer this could be with a more user-friendly interface, and it wasn’t long before we started talking about doing it ourselves :) I was in charge of the programming, while he did research. We began with a little login screen and worked our way from there, building dialog after dialog for adding students, creating classes, managing grades, until we had a nice little program that looked great . . . on the outside.

Problem was, we had little idea what we were doing. Without any sort of design or guidelines except those in our heads, we would pick and choose controls and data structures as we needed, and churn out code that utilized more linear searches and nested loops than I care to mention ;) Besides which our file management and encryption schemes were a bit primitive, and we could only get it to work on Windows 98!

However, this first major project of ours was a great learning experience. Despite all those problems, the program did do what we were trying to make it do (for the most part :); it hilighted the importance of working out a good design before writing up the code; and it gave a boost to our debugging skills, to name a few.

Still curious? You can take a look at the archive of our short-lived website (with some nice screenshots under the Features section), or glance at the readme file (which, just to let you know, has some “interesting” interactive popups associated with the program images :).