Create project groups, in minutes.
SimpleGroup SmartAssign pulls your roster and grades straight from Canvas, mixes in what you know about your students, and builds groups that actually balance, then writes them back to Canvas as a group set.
Designed for every K–12 learner
Better Groups. Better Balance. Better Learning.
Four steps
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Step 1
Link a Canvas course
A class is a Canvas course. Pick it once and the roster keeps itself current.
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Step 2
Add what Canvas can’t see
Grades arrive on their own. Add your own read on each student with the trait sliders.
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Step 3
Generate and adjust
Set a group size, add keep-together and keep-apart pairs, generate, and adjust by hand.
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Step 4
Push back to Canvas
Review the plan — including who Canvas will email — then publish the group set.
Runs on your own computer. Student data goes to your district’s Canvas and nowhere else.
See the full walkthrough
What lands in Canvas
Every group carries a balance score on the same green / amber / red tiers the engine uses, so you can see at a glance which ones came out clean and which one you might want to nudge. Drag a student between cards and every score recalculates before you commit anything.
- Keep-apart and keep-together pairs are shown in red and green, the way a seating chart would.
- Runs are kept, so you can re-roll with a new seed and go back to the one you liked.
- The projector view hides the scores — students see teams, not ratings.
- Ada L.
- Marcus B.
- Priya N.
- Owen K.
- Sofia R.
- Jonah T.
- Mei W.
- Dev A.
- Liam C.
- Nadia S.
- Eli P.
- Grace H.
Groups built on comparative advantage
Not the strongest students stacked together, and not spread evenly like butter — each student placed where their relative strengths do the most for the group.
Comparative advantage
Each student is placed where their relative strengths raise the group’s collective output — the same logic that makes specialization work anywhere else.
Communicative compatibility
Members who can establish common ground and coordinate. A group that can’t talk to itself doesn’t finish, however strong its parts.
Role differentiation
Balanced, interdependent roles rather than four people doing the same job and nobody doing the rest.
Student data never reaches us
This isn’t a policy we could quietly change — it’s how the software is built. There is no account to create and no cloud to opt out of.
- The app runs on your computer. There is no SimpleGroup server holding your roster.
- Student data moves between your machine and your district’s Canvas — nowhere else.
- No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no AI services. None.
Stop counting off by fours.
SimpleGroup is set up through your district: they create the Canvas developer key, then the app goes out to teachers. Tell us about your school and we’ll take it from there.