Random Name Picker Wheel

The random name picker is a wheel made for choosing people. Paste a list of names, spin, and one name comes up at random. Teachers use it to call on students without favorites, coaches to choose who starts, and friends to settle who goes first.

Unlike a plain spinner, it is set up for repeated draws: each name that comes up leaves the wheel, so nobody is picked twice until the whole list has had a turn. It opens with 20 sample names; replace them with your own and the list is saved on your device for next time.

1. Delete the sample names and paste your list, one name per line. A column copied from a spreadsheet works as it is.
2. Press Spin, tap the wheel or press Ctrl+Enter.
3. The chosen name appears in large type. Close the window and that name leaves the wheel.
4. Keep spinning. When every name has come up, the wheel refills itself and a short message tells you a new round has started.

Turn on classroom mode from the menu before you put the wheel on a smartboard or projector. Text gets larger for the back row, outbound links and social sharing buttons disappear, and a reminder that names stay on this device is shown. Classroom mode never shows advertising.

Press F or the full screen button to keep only the wheel, the Spin button and the live readout on screen; the display stays awake while it is open. For younger pupils or a noisy room, switch on “Announce the winner aloud” in Settings and your browser’s voice reads out each name.

Elimination mode is on by default on this page. A picked name drops out of the draw but stays visible in your list, greyed out, so you always know who has already answered. That state is saved too: refresh the page or come back after lunch and the wheel continues exactly where it stopped.

Prefer to keep everyone in play, for example to hand out points? Switch the mode to Normal, or to Accumulation, which counts how many times each name has come up and shows a scoreboard.

Someone is away today? In list view, untick the “in the wheel” box next to their name. In text view, add a tilde at the start of the line, like ~Noah. The name stays in your class list for tomorrow but cannot be drawn today. Tick the box again, or remove the tilde, when the student is back.

Give each class its own wheel. Open “My wheels” to create one per group, rename them (“Grade 5 Science”, “Period 3 French”) and switch between them in a tap. Every change saves automatically, and a deleted wheel waits 30 days in the trash. Before the end of the term, download a complete JSON backup so you can restore every class on another computer.

Select the column of names in Excel, Google Sheets or your school’s student information system, copy it and paste it into the editor: each cell becomes one entry. You can also import a TXT or CSV file, and the separator and header row are detected for you. The “Remove duplicates” button then cleans up names entered twice, ignoring capitals and accents.

Your students’ names never leave your device. The wheel is stored in your browser’s local storage, there is no account to open and nothing is uploaded to our server. Even a share link carries the list in the part after the #, which browsers do not send to any server. There is simply no third party holding your class list.

Cold calling and reading turns

Spin before each question so every student stays ready to answer, not just the usual volunteers.

Presentation order

Set several winners per spin to draw the full running order of presentations at once, ranked from first to last.

Groups and class jobs

For group work, the random team generator splits the class in one go. For classroom jobs, adapt the chore wheel, and warm up the lesson with the multiplication wheel or a few icebreaker questions.

Yes. Each name is drawn with the browser’s cryptographic generator before the wheel starts turning, and the wheel simply lands on it. With 20 names, every student has exactly a 5% chance on the first spin; in elimination mode the odds then rise to 1 in 19, 1 in 18, and so on, for everyone still in the wheel. If your class suspects a trick, show them the wheel fairness simulator, which spins thousands of times in a few seconds.