Seating Chart Maker
Paste the class list, say who must not sit together and who needs the front, and get a chart you can print the way you actually hold it. Reseat as often as you like — each new chart tries to give everyone a neighbour they have not had yet.
Why the printed chart is mirrored
A seating plan is drawn from above, and the usual convention puts the board at the top. That is the right drawing to pin on the wall or leave for a cover teacher, and it is the wrong one to hold in your hand at the front of the room.
Stand at the board facing the class and your left hand points to one side of the room. On a plan with the board at the top, that side appears on the right of the page. Read a name off the left of the sheet and you look to your right for the child — which is exactly how a register gets called wrongly in week one.
Turning the whole plan through 180° fixes both problems at once: the nearest row is nearest the bottom edge of the paper, and left on the page is left in the room. That is what the teacher's view does. The names themselves are not rotated, only their positions, so the sheet stays readable.
What the three rule boxes do
Keep apart stops a pair being neighbours. Keep together insists on it — useful for a reading partner or a translation buddy. Front row pins a name into the row nearest the board, which is where a hearing aid, a visual impairment or a support plan usually wants it.
Write one pair per line, separated by a comma or a vertical bar. Names are matched case-insensitively against the class list, and anything that matches nothing is listed on screen rather than ignored, so a typo does not quietly become a rule that was never applied.
All three are weighed at once by the solver, and they are not equal. Breaking a keep-apart rule is treated as the most serious, a missed front-row placement next, and a broken keep-together least. That ordering is what you want when the room is too small for every rule to hold.
Reseating without repeating neighbours
Half-termly reseating is meant to mix a class up, and a plain shuffle does not do that reliably: with thirty children and six desks per row, the same three or four pairs keep landing side by side.
So the page keeps a note of every neighbour pairing it has printed for you in this session. Press Reseat and it looks for an arrangement that gives as many people as possible somebody they have not yet sat beside, on top of the rules you set. The figure it reports afterwards — new pairs out of total pairs — is what tells you whether the room has any mixing left in it.
That memory lives in the tab only. Reload the page and it starts again from nothing. Reset clears it deliberately, which is what you want at the start of a new term.
Questions
Can it guarantee that two students never sit together?
No, and it says so. The solver runs several thousand swaps from several random starting points and keeps the best arrangement it finds. In a normal classroom that satisfies every keep-apart rule. Where it cannot — three children who must all be separated on a table of four, say — it names the rule it failed instead of printing a chart that looks correct.
How does it decide who counts as a neighbour?
It is read off the layout rather than guessed from distance on the page. In rows and paired desks a neighbour is the seat beside you plus the seats directly in front and behind, never a diagonal. At a table it is everybody at that table. On a horseshoe or circle it is the seat either side. The rules and the new-neighbour count all use that same definition.
What happens if I have more students than seats?
It never runs out. Rows, paired desks and tables add as many rows or tables as the class needs, and the horseshoe and circle space themselves for the number of names you gave. Any seats left over are drawn as blank desks and pushed towards the back, so the front of the room stays filled.
Which way round should I print the chart?
Teacher's view for the copy you carry: front row nearest the bottom, left on the page matching your left. Students' view for the copy you pin up or leave for a cover teacher, since that is the plan of the room they will expect. The heading on the sheet states which of the two it is.
Do the names leave my computer?
No. Everything is worked out by a script in your own browser, so the class list, the rules and the chart stay on your device and the page keeps working with the network off. Nothing is stored between visits. The advertising slot is a separate thing and will load third-party resources of its own once advertising is enabled.
Limits worth knowing before you print
The room is a rectangle. There is no door, no window, no pillar and no way to mark the desk with the broken leg. Layouts are regular by design — if your room is not, print the chart and annotate it.
It balances nothing beyond the rules you type. It does not know reading ages, behaviour records, friendship groups or who needs a quiet corner, and it will not spread those around for you. Names longer than a seat are squeezed to fit rather than truncated, so a very long double-barrelled surname prints narrow.