Matching Students based on Choice of 3

[MrWilliams1873]

Hello All,

I am looking for a solution to help with assigning lunch table seats while allowing some element of choice from students.

I have roughly 110 students who would ideally like to sit with their friends during lunch; however, we cannot allow free seating at this time. Currently, due to COVID, our table configurations can fit either groups of 4 or 2. I would like to give students a chance to fill out a google form and perhaps list their top 3-4 choices of other students that they would like to sit with, giving them a guarantee of being matched with at least 1 other person if the numbers/results work out.

I was planning to just sort through the choices on my own but does anyone know if there is a way to use excel more efficiently to sort through the student results?

 

[DRSteele]

Welcome to the Forum.

I think that optimisation problems like this are conceptually difficult, which makes trying to contort them into Excel a monumentally difficult task.

An obvious confounding factor here is that everyone could chose to sit with the same four students (including those four students), probably the two hottest cheerleaders and the two best football jocks. That would mean the allocation would be reduced to random assignment.

Alternatively, it could be that most students could pick the same four, so most of the allocation would still need to be random. Or most students might pick the same 10 or 20 or whatever large number of the same students. Or in the improbable scenario where each student was picked in a uniform fashion, that would present probably the only obvious simple solution.