assigngroups

In many of my classes, I have the students work together on some activities. Usually, I want them sorted into groups of about 3 or 4, but I don't want them only working with their friends or neighbors each time. I'd rather they work in different groups each time. Hence, this program.

This script will read in the roster for the class from a text file and randomly assign them into groups. The user can either specify the groups size to aim for, or the number of groups total to use (but not both). The results are saved to a text file. Optionally, the groups are displayed on the screen or sent directly to the printer.

Included is a dummy file students.txt which contains 25 names. The names were themselves randomly generated.

By default, the groups are saved to a text file of the form YYYYMMDD.txt using the current date. If the -d option is set, then the date the class meets (or whatever) can be set instead. If the -o option is set, then the data gets saved to the specified file.

usage

usage: assigngroups [-h] [-i INFILE] [-o OUTFILE] [-d DATE] [-p]
                    [-s GROUPSIZE] [-n NUMBEROFGROUPS] [-v]

Creates randomly assigned groups of students of similar sizes

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -i INFILE, --in-file INFILE
                        Name of the file containing the class roster
  -o OUTFILE, --out-file OUTFILE
                        Name of the file to write the groups to
  -d DATE, --date DATE  Date that the groups will be meeting in YYYYMMDD
                        format
  -p, --print           Send the information to the default printer
  -s GROUPSIZE, --size GROUPSIZE
                        Size of the groups to aim for. Do not use with -n
  -n NUMBEROFGROUPS, --number-of-groups NUMBEROFGROUPS
                        Number of groups to make. Do not use with -s
  -v, --verbose         Lots of stuff gets printed out