Workshop Breakout Generator

What this generator does

Respects the room list. The group generator splits people into groups of roughly equal size, which is fine until the rooms are different sizes or somebody has to be somewhere specific — and then it silently produces a split that does not fit the building. This treats each room's capacity as a hard limit and tells you when the numbers do not work.

How to use this tool

1. Enter the participants, one per line.
2. Enter the rooms, one per line, with the number each seats after a colon.
3. Pin facilitators with a must-be rule, and add must-not-be rules for anyone to be separated.
4. Press Assign rooms and check the status line before publishing.

Understanding the controls

Participants

One name per line. If there are more participants than seats across all rooms, the tool says so before allocating rather than overfilling a room.

Rooms

One per line with the seats after a colon — "Room A: 6". Rooms of different sizes are the normal case and are handled directly, rather than being approximated by equal groups.

Must be / must not be

Use must be to pin a facilitator to the room they are running. Use must not be to keep people apart — bar one of them from the room the other is pinned to.

Spread numbers evenly

Levels the numbers across rooms within their capacities. Turn it off when you would rather fill the large rooms and leave the small one lightly loaded.

Worked examples

Twelve people, three rooms of four

Four in each, everyone seated.

Uneven rooms

Rooms of 6, 4 and 2 hold exactly that — the split follows the building rather than the arithmetic.

Too many people

Fourteen participants and twelve seats is reported as impossible, with the shortfall of two named.

Common use cases

• A training day splitting into rooms of different sizes
• A conference workshop where each room has a named facilitator
• An away day where colleagues from the same team should be mixed up
• A classroom or lecture splitting into tutorial groups with a room limit
• Any session where the rooms hold different numbers and the split has to fit

How this generator works

Pinned people are placed first, then the rest are assigned by backtracking search under the room capacities, placing the most constrained person first. Because capacity is a hard constraint, no room is ever over-filled, and if the participants cannot all be seated the tool reports that up front with the shortfall counted rather than producing a split that will not fit on the day.

Randomness and fairness

Everyone not pinned by a rule is placed at random among the rooms that have space and are not barred to them, with ties between equally suitable rooms broken randomly rather than by room order. Without that tie-breaking every free participant would fill the first room before touching the second.

For how randomness is produced across the whole site, see how Generate Random works.

Limitations and good to know

• Rooms are modelled only by how many they seat. Accessibility, equipment, projectors and proximity are not represented at all, so check the assignment against the actual building.
• There is no notion of balancing seniority, department or experience across rooms — only of keeping named individuals apart.
• The split is for one session. Running several rounds with different mixes means re-running it and pinning differently each time.
• A participant list is a list of real people, so consider using first names or initials if the printed sheet will be left in a room.

Common mistakes

Forgetting to pin the facilitators

Add a must-be rule for each one before generating, or the person running Room B may be assigned to Room C.

Assuming even groups when the rooms are uneven

Turn even spreading off if the rooms genuinely differ in size — otherwise the tool will level the numbers and leave a large room half empty.

Practical tips

• Print one sheet per room rather than one list — people find their name faster on a door than in a full-cohort list.
• Generate a second, different split for the afternoon so participants meet a new group, and pin the facilitators the same way.

Privacy and your data

Participant names and room rules stay in your browser and are never uploaded, stored or written into the page address. That matters for a delegate list, which is personal data — nothing here transmits it, and closing the tab discards it. Analytics records only how many people were assigned.

Frequently asked questions

Can I keep two people in separate rooms?

Yes, indirectly: pin one to a room and bar the other from it. The rules attach a person to a room rather than to another person.

What if there are more people than seats?

The tool reports it before allocating and names the shortfall, rather than overfilling a room.

Can rooms be different sizes?

Yes — that is the main reason to use this rather than the group generator.