Group work without the eye-rolls
Every teacher knows the two hard parts of group work happen before the work starts: making the groups fair, and keeping certain students apart. This free random group generator does both. Type your roster once — it's saved in your browser and shared with the rest of Class Zone — choose whether you want groups of a fixed size (say, fours) or a fixed number of groups (say, six teams), and click Generate. Sizes are always balanced so no group is stuck with one extra or one short by more than a single student.
Keep-apart rules that actually hold
Click a couple of names into the Keep apart list and the generator places those students in different groups. Add as many pairs as you need. If the pairs you've listed genuinely can't all be honored for the number of groups you asked for — three students who all must be separated, but only two groups — the tool doesn't fail silently: it produces the best arrangement it can and prints a clear note listing exactly which pairs it couldn't separate, so you can bump the group count and re-roll.
How teachers use it
- Lab and project teams: groups of 3–4, re-rolled until the room nods.
- Stations: a fixed number of groups matched to your number of stations.
- Debates and Socratic seminars: two big groups, keep-apart rules for the students who feed off each other.
- Print it: one click gives you a clean group sheet for the wall or a handout — no logins, no ads, no color ink.
The Re-roll button reshuffles with the same settings, so if a group doesn't feel right you're one tap from a fresh draw. And because the roster is shared, the same class powers the random name picker and the seating chart generator.