Clever Groups is used by teachers, corporate team leaders, camp coordinators, and many others. This guide describes things from a teacher and their class of students perspective — the same concepts apply regardless of your context, and can handle up to 1,000 team members.
There are two things to understand: the model (what the pieces are) and the workflow (what you and your students actually do).
Why a spreadsheet can’t do this
For each possible arrangement of groups, Clever Groups checks every student’s preferences against their actual group. The number of preference checks grows steeply with class size — for a class of 50, it’s already in the thousands.
A teacher can reason about a few students at a time. Clever Groups evaluates all constraints simultaneously, in seconds.
Three things go in. One thing comes out.
A Team is everyone you want to group together — a single class, multiple classes, a whole year level, a school cohort, or any other group of people. Everyone in it is a Team Member. You can label each person with a category — any label that makes sense for your context: Boy / Girl, High / Mid / Low ability, Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced. Clever Groups uses categories to balance group composition.
Categories are optional. Add them when group balance matters; skip them when any mix will do.
You can have up to 20 teams — one per class, year level, subject, cohort, or any other grouping you need.
Each Team Member names the classmates they’d like to be grouped with, in order. Preference 1 is the most important — Clever Groups works through them in sequence. There’s no fixed limit on the number of preferences.
In practice, 2–3 preferences is typical. Clever Groups tries to honour as many requests as possible across the whole class — not just the most popular students.
Preferences can be entered by the teacher directly for any student who hasn’t yet joined the team — useful when you want to run the full process yourself, or when students are too young to submit their own. Once a student joins and submits their own preferences, they manage their own data.
Joining and submitting preferences is always free for students — no account, no payment, no friction.
Constraints are optional rules you set before generating. Clever Groups respects them all while still maximising preference satisfaction.
Pairs of students who must never be in the same group.
Specify the number of groups of each size — e.g. two groups of 3 and one group of 4. Groups can be different sizes.
The balance of categories within each group — e.g. 2 boys + 2 girls per group.
What you do, and optionally what your students do.
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