DeskRoster

I’ve been working on DeskRoster, a free browser-based classroom seating chart maker designed for teachers.

The idea came from a pretty simple problem: creating a classroom seating plan often means moving names around manually, rebuilding desk layouts, or working with tools that are much more complicated than the task itself.

So I wanted to make something lightweight.

With DeskRoster, teachers can:

• Add or paste a student list
• Arrange desks to match the classroom
• Generate seating assignments
• Add seating preferences and constraints
• Drag students around to fine-tune the result
• Print or save the finished seating chart

The tool runs directly in the browser, and there’s no account required.

One of the more interesting parts to build was balancing automatic seat generation with manual control. A fully random seating chart is easy to generate, but real classrooms have constraints: some students need to sit apart, some should stay in the same group, and teachers often want to lock certain seats before generating the rest.

I’m still improving the workflow and would especially love feedback from anyone who has built tools involving drag-and-drop layouts or constraint-based assignment.

You can try it here:

https://deskroster.com/