Randomly assign group with minimum membership

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I have 11 students and 8 lab stations. I want them to work in at least pairs, with 1  remaining group of 3.

People>Groups has a "randomly assign group members" and it spread the students across the 8 groups, which makes 5 groups of 1, and 3 groups of 2.

For 'n' students, 'm' minimum number of students/group, and 'z' groups, the number of groups we need to fill is:

z = n / m

The remaining students will be 'y', with y < m. Distribute the remaining y across the z groups. Every group will have a minimum of m and up to m-1 groups will have an extra person. I hope the math helps the implementation!

 

I could manually change the number of groups to 5 (4 pairs + 1 triple), but if someone has to remotely work due to covid-19, I want to have the framework to easily drop them into their own group. Additionally, the 8 groups for the entire semester presents consistency for the students and myself.

Thanks!

 

3 Comments
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Open
 
STEM_chad
Community Member
Author

Another way to think about this is:

If I have 8 groups, fill the first 5 groups with two people, and put the 1 remaining person into one of the groups.  The z=n/m part was generalizing in case other professors have a different number of groups and different desired number of students per group.

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
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