A seating chart that respects the students you already worry about
A random seating chart is easy. A random seating chart that keeps the two students who cannot sit together apart, keeps the student who needs the front row up front, and skips the desk with the broken leg — that's the one you actually need on the first day of a new unit. This free seating chart generator does exactly that. Set your rows and columns to match your room, and you get a live grid you edit by tapping.
Three edit modes
- Block a seat you don't use — a broken desk, the space in front of the door — and the randomizer leaves it empty.
- Pin a student to a specific desk and they stay there through every re-randomize. Great for a student who needs proximity to you or a paraeducator.
- Swap mode lets you drag any two students to trade places when you want to nudge the auto-generated chart by hand.
Keep-apart that understands a real room
Add keep-apart pairs from the side panel and hit Randomize. The solver treats all eight surrounding desks as "next to," so a flagged pair won't end up as neighbors — not front-to-back, not diagonally. Under the hood it shuffles and repairs up to two hundred times to satisfy your rules; if your room is genuinely too small to honor every pair, it seats everyone anyway and prints a clear note listing the pairs it couldn't separate, so you can free up a seat or loosen a rule.
When the chart looks right, Download PNG drops it straight into a sub plan or a slide, and Print gives you a clean black-and-white copy for the clipboard. Everything — your roster, your blocked seats, your pins — lives only in your browser, and the same class roster powers the name picker and the group generator in Class Zone.