Random Team Generator

Why this is not a wheel

Spinning one name at a time is the wrong shape for this job. If you need four teams from twenty-four people, you do not want twenty-four spins — you want the whole list dealt out at once, with the groups coming out even.

So this tool shuffles instead of spinning. Your names are shuffled with the same crypto.getRandomValues() source the wheels use, then dealt round-robin into the teams one at a time. Dealing rather than chopping the list into blocks is what keeps the sizes even: with 22 people across 4 teams you get 6, 6, 5, 5 — never 8, 8, 5, 1.

If you do want a single name instead, the random name picker is the tool for that.

Two ways to split

By number of teams. You know you want four groups; the tool works out how many people go in each. This is the usual classroom and workshop case.

By people per team. You know you want pairs, or threes, or groups of five; the tool works out how many groups that makes. The last group takes the remainder, so 17 people in groups of 5 gives you three fives and a two.

Switch between them with the Split by dropdown. The label on the number box changes to match, so it is always clear what the number means.

Naming the teams

Teams come out as Team 1 through Team n unless you say otherwise. Type your own names into the Team names box, separated by commas:

Red, Blue, Green, Gold

Anything you do not name keeps its number, so you can name the first two and leave the rest. Handy for house systems, colour tables, breakout rooms or naming groups after whatever the class is studying that week.

Copy teams puts the whole result on your clipboard as plain text, one team per line, ready to paste into a lesson plan, a Slack message or a spreadsheet.

Getting a genuinely fresh split

Press Generate teams again and you get a completely new shuffle — not a rotation of the previous one. Every arrangement is as likely as every other, which is the point, but it also means two consecutive splits can look similar by chance. That is not the tool failing to shuffle; with 16 people and 4 teams there are more arrangements than there are seconds in a million years, and human eyes are very good at spotting the one pair that stayed together.

What the tool deliberately does not do is balance for skill, gender, reading level or who works well with whom. It has no idea about any of that. If those things matter for the activity, generate a split and then move a couple of people by hand — a random starting point with a small human correction usually beats either extreme.

Where teams get used

• Classrooms. Group work, lab partners, debate sides, review-game teams. More classroom tools on the classroom hub.
• Workshops and training. Breakout groups that are not just whoever sat together.
• Sports and PE. Pick-up sides without the captain ritual that leaves someone last.
• Game nights. Teams for trivia, charades or anything that needs even sides. Pair it with who goes first.
• Standups and retros. Pairing for code review, mob rotation, secret santa groups.