Generating Placements

Generating Placements

Once you have added your students, classrooms, and configured any preferences, restrictions, or required placements, you are ready to generate a balanced placement.

How to Trigger Generation

To generate a placement:

• Open the Workspace Overview for your placement workspace.
• Review your placement settings (default students per classroom and boy/girl difference allowed per classroom) and adjust if needed.
• Click Generate Placement to start the process.

The button is disabled while a generation is in progress. You will see a loading indicator until the process completes.

Free accounts include 3 placement generations per workspace. After the third generation, Shibutz keeps every existing result readable and shows an upgrade prompt before another generation starts. Pro users can generate unlimited placements.

Before You Generate

When you click Generate Placement, Shibutz first looks for obvious setup problems in your workspace. If something makes a valid placement impossible, generation stops right away and you see a short message naming the issue and how to fix it. These blocking checks include:

• No students or no classrooms — there is nothing to place or nowhere to place students.
• Capacity overflow— total classroom capacity, or a single classroom's capacity, can't hold the students placed into it.
• Impossible gender balance — the boy/girl gap is too large to split across your classrooms within the allowed boy/girl difference per classroom.
• Invalid required placements — a required placement points at a student or classroom that no longer exists, or duplicates a student across classrooms.
• Contradictory rules — a pair appears in both preferences and restrictions, or restricted students are forced into the same classroom.

Risk-only situations (such as a student separated from more peers than you have classrooms) are surfaced as warnings rather than blocks, so you can still generate intentionally. The Constraint Health card on your workspace overview uses the same readiness checks, highlighting blocking issues and warnings as you build your workspace so many problems surface well before you reach the Generate button.

What Happens Behind the Scenes

When you click Generate Placement, the system sends all your data to the placement engine. The algorithm then:

• Applies all required placements first, before placing the remaining students.
• Enforces all restrictions to keep separated students apart.
• Distributes the remaining students across classrooms while respecting classroom capacity and boy/girl balance settings.
• Optimizes for friend placement (honoring preferences) and balances academic and behavioral scales across classrooms.

Processing Time

Generation typically takes a few seconds for a standard school setup. Larger student populations or heavily constrained configurations may take longer. The system will notify you when the process finishes.

Handling Failures and Warnings

Most impossible setups are caught instantly by the checks before generation above. If Shibutz still cannot find a valid placement after those checks pass, you will see an error message. Common causes include:

• Too many constraints — Conflicting restrictions, required placements, or an overly tight boy/girl balance limit can leave no feasible arrangement.
• Classroom size too low — The classroom capacity setting does not leave enough room to fit all students.
• Conflicting rules — Two restricted students are both required to be in the same classroom, or other contradictions exist.

To resolve failures:

• Review your restrictions and required placements for conflicts.
• Try relaxing your settings — increase the classroom size cap or raise the boy/girl balance limit.
• Delete non-essential constraints and generate a new placement.

Generating a New Placement with Different Parameters

You can generate placements multiple times. Each run produces a new result based on your current data and settings. This lets you:

• Experiment with different constraint combinations to see how they affect classroom composition.
• Compare results across runs by adjusting settings between generations.
• Try loosening or tightening specific constraints to find the best balance for your school.

Viewing Placement Results

After a successful generation, the placement result opens directly on your dashboard. You can see each classroom with its placed students, along with statistics about boy/girl balance, scale distribution, and preference fulfillment. For a detailed walkthrough of the output, see Understanding Results.

For more information on how the algorithm processes your data, see How the Algorithm Works.