Randomantic How to use the random group generator
- Enter or paste names, one per line.
- Choose to split by number of groups or by people per group, then set the amount.
- Click Generate groups — click again any time for a fresh shuffle.
Where random groups help
Random grouping keeps things fair and mixes people up: breakout rooms and workshops, classroom project groups and lab benches, tournament pools, icebreaker rounds, and dividing a big crowd into manageable teams. Splitting by size is ideal when a station or activity fits exactly a certain number of people. Because it runs in your browser, your list stays on your device.
By group count or by group size?
These two settings answer different questions and choosing wrongly is the main reason a split comes out awkward.
Split by number of groups when the constraint is how many groups you can handle — four breakout rooms, three facilitators, two sides of a debate. Group sizes then vary with your headcount, which is fine for discussion work.
Split by people per group when the constraint is the activity — a lab bench that fits three, a board game for four, a station with four sets of equipment. The number of groups then falls out of the headcount, and you may end up with one short group, which matters far less than having a group of five crowded round a four-person task.
What group size does to behaviour
Size is not a neutral administrative detail; it changes how people act. Pairs give the most airtime per person and nowhere to hide, which is why they work for practice and peer review — though a mismatched pair has no third party to rescue it. Threes are the smallest group with a real dynamic, and reliably produce one quieter member, so give trios tasks with three distinct roles. Fours and fives are the sweet spot for project work: enough perspectives, still small enough that everyone has to contribute. Six and above is where social loafing sets in and one or two people start doing the work for everybody.
Handling the leftovers
Twenty-two people into groups of four leaves a remainder, and you have three options: one group of two, one group of six, or spread the extras so some groups have five. Spreading them is usually best — a group of six behaves noticeably differently from a group of four, while a group of five barely does. For a competitive activity, say how you handled it out loud, because an uneven split is the first thing a losing team will point at.
Reshuffling across a term or a workshop
Independent random draws repeat more than people expect, so running this fresh each week will put the same two people together again fairly soon. If deliberate mixing is the goal, keep a note of previous groupings and reshuffle until the new set looks different enough. Reshuffling in front of the group is worth doing either way — the visible randomness is what stops the split being argued with.
Picking the right splitter
- Groups by count or by size: this page.
- Evenly sized teams for a game: the random team generator.
- Exactly two people: the random pair generator.
- Order within a group: the list randomizer.
- Who presents first: the wheel spinner.