Shuffle

Shuffle takes formatted lists of items and randomly sorts them. If you choose to provide numerical values for the items, then it will also maintain a priority order in the random results.

Visit here for a live version of the app.

Usage

Note: As of March 5, 2017, it appears that the file upload feature does not work properly on Windows. This is due to a bug with the file input tag behavior and affects all major web browswers on Windows. This bug is summarized in this Stack Overflow post, which unfortunately as of today appears to have no solution.

1. Prepare a text file of items (and numerical values, if you desire), one per line. Shuffle supports the following formats:
   • .csv, separate names from values with commas
   • .tsv, separate names from values with tabs
   • .txt, each line considered as one item with no value
2. Hover over the floating action button, and click the green import button. Select the file and click import.
3. Hover over the floating action button, and click the blue settings button to adjust settings for your shuffle.
   • Results delay adjusts the time in seconds between subsequent "draws" of cards
   • Point priority toggles whether high or low numerical values correspond to high or low priority
   • Waitlist cutoff sets the number of results after which the waitlist begins
4. Click the floating play button to shuffle the cards and display the results.
5. Hover over the floating action button, and click the orange export button to export the results to a text file.

Background

Shuffle was created as a more user-friendly replacement to the command line programs Eligibility and Room Draw. Both of these programs were used at McMurtry College at Rice University to determine ordered lists for housing selection.

The students who managed housing had always been programming literate, and thus the command line programs worked for a number of years. It became clear that once a non-programmer had to run these systems, a web-based version was needed. And thus, Shuffle was born.

And as with most projects, I procrastinated and left it until the last second. There are certainly rough edges, but it is nevertheless a decent program for something that was hacked together in a week. :)

Credits

Thanks are due to the Materialize and Shuffle libraries, without which this project could not have been possible.

Thanks to the original authors of the command line programs: my colleagues Kevin Lin (Rice '13) and Adam Bloom (Rice '15).