By Mark Sciberras
Every year, as part of her role as a primary school teacher, my wife used to spend hours painstakingly reorganising her current pupils into new classes for the next academic year. Striking the right balance of abilities with an equal distribution of boys and girls was tricky enough, but additionally she needed to take into account friendships and separate pupils who together were a disruptive influence. Then there were the inevitable non-negotiable requests from parents to consider.
As a software engineer, I wondered whether I could help her with that task, and ended up writing an Excel solution which we called the “Sorting Wizard.” My wife and her colleagues have been using it for a number of years now, over which time it has evolved by incorporating new ideas and functionality.
I’d always wanted to rewrite the Sorting Wizard using a modern tech stack that I could publish online. After several months of development, testing, and feedback from a group of friends within the education sector, I was finally able to come up with a web version: sortingwizard.com.
How It Works
Just set your sorting parameters, enter the student data (either manually or by importing an Excel file), and go! The Sorting Wizard will validate and processes this information, ensuring even and equal group formations while providing visual feedback and detailed summaries of the results.
The application features an intuitive and user-friendly interface for seamless management and analysis of group assignments. Plus, there are plenty of tutorials on the website to guide you through the process, should you need any assistance.
It is my hope that the Sorting Wizard will benefit teachers tasked with class sorting by providing an easy and free-to-use online tool that produces better, faster, and more reliable results than if the sorting was done manually. And if you don’t like the results, simply run it again!
Mark Sciberras is a software development manager living in Fleet, Hampshire, along with his deputy head teaching wife, Catherine, his two children, and Hank the dog. He is a lifelong Brentford Football Club fan and occasionally shows glimpses of mediocracy on the golf course.