Breakout Group Planner

Partition participants into breakout rooms and calculate usable task time.

Description

Breakout planning partitions a roster into capacity-limited rooms and reserves setup time.

Breakout planning partitions a roster into capacity-limited rooms and reserves setup time. The last room can have fewer participants than the others.^[1]

Partition participants into breakout rooms and calculate usable task time.

When to use Breakout Group Planner

Use this tool to partition participants into breakout rooms and calculate usable task time.

Prepare the lesson timeline, roster, observations or assessment labels requested. Use consistent units and exact identifiers, then choose comparison criteria appropriate to the activity.

How to use Breakout Group Planner and understand its results

Prepare the lesson timeline, roster, observations or assessment labels requested. Use consistent units and exact identifiers, then choose comparison criteria appropriate to the activity.
Enter participantIds, maximumRoomSize, activityMinutes, setupMinutes using the field table and calculation rules, then run the tool.
Read roomAssignments, roomCount, workingMinutes. The explanation below defines the units, signs, ordering and any flags or placeholder values.
If the tool reports an input issue, correct the values and run it again. Apply the stated assumptions when interpreting a successfully returned result.

Input field	Meaning	Value type; see rules below	Requirement
participantIds	Participant ids	list of string	Required
maximumRoomSize	Maximum room size	number	Required
activityMinutes	Activity minutes	number	Required
setupMinutes	Setup minutes	number	Required

Enter nonempty unique exact participants, positive safe-integer room capacity, nonnegative setup and activity time strictly greater than setup. Group consecutive roster slices and return comma-joined rooms, count and work time.

roomCount=ceil(participants/maximumSize); workingMinutes=activityMinutes−setupMinutes

Units, indexing, boundary conditions and exceptional cases are defined in the calculation rules above.

Output field	Meaning	Value type
roomAssignments	Room assignments	list of string
roomCount	Room count	number
workingMinutes	Working minutes	number

json

{
  "input": {
    "participantIds": [
      "A",
      "B",
      "C",
      "D",
      "E"
    ],
    "maximumRoomSize": 2,
    "activityMinutes": 12,
    "setupMinutes": 2
  },
  "output": {
    "roomAssignments": [
      "A,B",
      "C,D",
      "E"
    ],
    "roomCount": 3,
    "workingMinutes": 10
  }
}

Limitations and assumptions

This fills earlier rooms to capacity rather than balancing sizes. IDs containing commas are not escaped; no platform rooms are created.

Numeric inputs must be finite. Follow the calculation-specific rules for overflow, underflow and exceptional cases. Lists are limited to 100,000 entries; the rules above may require smaller limits. Missing required fields, extra fields, wrong value types and violations of the calculation rules are input errors.

Alternative or Complementary methods

Use Flexible Grouping Roster: Regroup learners by current assessment score into balanced contiguous skill bands. For a complementary task, use Station Rotation Schedule: Create a cyclic station-rotation schedule with one visit per group per station.

References

Breakout Group Planner — tool.io

Similar or alternative tools

Flexible Grouping Roster
Regroup learners by current assessment score into balanced contiguous skill bands.
Station Rotation Schedule
Create a cyclic station-rotation schedule with one visit per group per station.