How it works

The tool takes three things — a list of students, the shape of your room, and your rules about who sits where — and shuffles names into desks until it satisfies as many of those rules as it can. Everything runs in your browser, so there is no account to make and nothing to upload.

Step 1: Paste your roster

Put one student per line in the roster box. Copying a column out of a spreadsheet or gradebook usually pastes exactly that way, so most teachers never type a name by hand. Blank lines and stray spaces are ignored.

Names are used only as labels, so first names or initials work fine — and are the better choice if the printed chart will sit out on a desk. If you have two students with the same first name, add a last initial so the rules can tell them apart. If you just want to see what the tool does, click “Use a sample class of 12” and a fake roster fills in.

The roster box has to have real names in it. If it is empty, generation stops and tells you so rather than quietly inventing students.

Step 2: Describe the room

Enter the number of rows and how many desks sit in each row. Row 1 is the row closest to the board; the chart is drawn from the teacher's point of view with a “front of class” label across the top, so it matches what you see standing at the front.

Rows times desks should be at least the number of students on your roster. Give yourself a little slack — a grid with a few empty desks is much easier to solve than one where every seat is taken, because the solver has somewhere to move people. Empty seats are marked so you can see where the gaps landed.

Rooms with table groups or pods rarely map perfectly onto a grid. The usual trick is to treat each pod as a row: four tables of six becomes four rows of six, and the printed chart still tells you who sits with whom.

Step 3: Add behaviour rules

Rules are what make the chart yours. Add as many as you need; each one names a student from your roster, and names that do not match anything on the roster are flagged instead of being applied silently.

Keep Apart

Two students who cannot be neighbours. Use it for the pair who talk through every instruction, the two who escalate each other, or a combination a counselor has asked you to avoid. It pushes them out of adjacent desks, not to opposite corners, so don't hesitate to add several.

Front of Class

Anchors a student in the rows nearest the board. This is the rule for accommodations — vision, hearing, attention — and for anyone who works better within easy reach of you. Because several students usually need front seats, list them all and let the solver distribute them across the front rather than stacking them in one spot.

Pair Together

Seats two students next to each other on purpose: a reading partner, a language partner, a peer who models the routine well, or a student who settles when someone steady is beside them. Pairing has a cost, so pair deliberately rather than pairing everyone.

Rules can pull against each other — pairing A with B while keeping B away from C in a room with only one open seat may be impossible. When that happens the tool reports which rules it could not satisfy instead of pretending the chart is perfect.

Reading the results

Press Generate seating chart and you get a grid of desks with names in them, oriented front-of-room-first. Above it, any warnings: rules that were skipped because a name was blank or unrecognised, and rules the solver could not honour given the room.

Generate again and you get a different arrangement that still respects your rules. That is the fastest way to work: regenerate a few times, and keep the version that looks right to you. You know things about the room the tool never will.

Printing the chart

The print button produces a clean one-page chart: just the heading, the front-of-class label and the desks in black on white. The form, navigation and everything else on the page are left off, and rows are kept from splitting across pages. Landscape is the default because most rooms are wider than they are deep.

Save it as a PDF from the same dialog if you want a copy for a substitute folder. Keep behaviour notes off the printed page — a chart that sits on a desk can be read by anyone who walks past.

For the classroom judgement behind the rules, read the seating guides, or go straight to the seating chart maker.