About SimpleGroup
Why it exists, and how decisions about it get made.
Every teacher running group work has the same two bad options: count off by fours and accept whatever comes out, or spend an evening moving names around on paper. The research tools that solve this properly were built for university researchers working with consenting adults. A high school teacher with thirty sophomores and a first-period bell is a different problem.
SimpleGroup Smart Assign grew out of a simple observation: grouping is broken. Time and again, students face uneven workloads and teammates who don't mesh, while teachers lose hours building balanced groups by hand. We built SimpleGroup to fix both — turning teachers' own judgment into balanced teams engineered for student growth and stronger project results.
SimpleGroup is that tool rebuilt for the classroom: it takes what the school already knows about a student from Canvas, adds the thing only their teacher knows, and produces groups that balance on criteria you chose and can explain.
What doesn’t change
The best data is already in the room
Most grouping tools start with a student survey. We don’t. Self-report gets gamed, and a student asked whether they work hard always says yes. The person who has watched these thirty kids all year is the better judge. SimpleGroup takes what the teacher already knows and turns it into balanced teams that help students grow and get better work done.
Local-first is a commitment, not a stage
Student records we never receive are records we can never leak, lose, or be compelled to hand over. It is harder to ship and harder to support, and it rules out whole business models. We took that on purpose.
No criterion that stands in for who a student is
Sorting students by things like race, sex or disability can cause real harm, and it’s the outcome that counts, not the intent. We build to that standard even when no one is watching.
What we won’t do
- Put student data on a server we operate.
- Add analytics, telemetry, crash reporting, or any AI service.
- Ship a grouping criterion that stands in for a protected characteristic.
- Write anything to Canvas that a teacher hasn’t read and confirmed.
- Sell, share, or broker anything about a student. There is nothing to sell.
Built for one classroom at a time.
If this sounds like the way your school thinks about student data, we should talk.