In my previous post on using OneNote with students, I wrote about the need to choose students to be responsible for each day's notes. This needed to be deliberately planned and fair to students. Here were my requirements:
- Over the course of a quarter or semester, students had to be picked around the same number of times.
- I needed groups of two or more students for redundancy.
- If a student was picked for a given week, there should be some time before being picked again. If repetition of a given student did occur, cycling through the class was a requirement before that student could reappear.
After a while playing around with this, I came up with the code below. Feel free to play with the code. It's embedded in this post through the nifty tools from http://trinket.io..
Here's a walkthrough of the algorithm: fill a list with the student names, and then shuffle the list. Create groups of the desired size until there aren't enough to create a full group. Make a new copy of the student list, shuffle it, and then remove the students that remain from the first list. Finally, tack those remaining students at the beginning of the second list. Repeat until you have the number of groups that you are looking for, and then print out the list.
I can see a number of other applications for something like this. My hope is that you take some time to adapt it to your needs, and then circle back here to share what you used it to do.
