As a TA, I knew some of my students might not want to answer questions or even ask questions because they have no clue about what I am talking about. Sometimes, discussion with several random group members before revealing the answer together as a whole group is beneficial. Therefore, I coded up a random group generator to help them. You might say, zoom has this function already. But most of the time, I also use it as a way to generate a schedule of who will answer which question. Just by setting how many groups you want to generate equal to the total number of people, you will have a number before each student’s name. I showed this schedule to my students before class, so they could prepare the answer well. If they fail to answer the question, I will provide more sub-questions to guide them. It is helpful when we articulate our thinking and sometimes the answer will become oblivious as we are speaking.
When you use the random group generator, make sure to put your students’ names into the variable student_name.
var student_name =
"Apple Zeng\n"+
"Mango Wu\n"+
"Pear Zhang\n"+
"Avacado Gao\n"+
"Potato Han\n"+
"Banana Chen\n"+
"Tomato Li\n"