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Student Team Formation

Overview

The Student Team Formation line of projects explores how to intelligently assign students to teams and projects based on:

  • Skills and experience
  • Interests and preferences
  • Project requirements and constraints
  • Fairness and diversity criteria

This family includes:

  • OptiTeam 🌰 – next-generation ILP-based team formation engine
  • Team Genesis ♻️ – first-generation greedy algorithm–based approach (archived, but foundational)

OptiTeam 🌰

OptiTeam aims to transform natural-language inputs and structured constraints into optimized team assignments using an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) solver.

Conceptual Workflow

flowchart LR
  A[Instructor inputs project list<br/>+ constraints] --> B[Collect student preferences<br/>and skills]
  B --> C[Optimization Model<br/>(ILP)]
  C --> D[Feasible assignment(s)]
  D --> E[Instructor review & adjustments]

Inputs:

  • List of projects (with capacities, skill needs, constraints)
  • Student skill profiles and self-reported preferences
  • Hard and soft constraints (e.g., minimum/maximum team sizes, diversity constraints)

Outputs:

  • Assignments of students to teams and projects
  • Metrics explaining why a particular assignment was chosen (e.g., satisfied preferences, balance scores)

Team Genesis ♻️

Team Genesis is the first-generation system that used greedy heuristics to assign students to teams. Although it is now archived, its design and outcomes inform OptiTeam’s new formulation.

  • Status: Archived
  • Value today: Historical baseline and source of requirements/lessons learned.

Integration with the CSED Platform

Team formation tools can integrate with other services:

  • Psephos / Capstone Survey – collect skills and project preferences
  • UMACS – manage student identities and access
  • SkillNet – provide richer, longitudinal skill profiles 
flowchart LR
  Survey[Capstone Survey / Psephos] --> Data[Student & project data]
  Data --> OptiTeam[OptiTeam<br/>ILP Engine]
  OptiTeam --> Results[Team Assignments]
  Results --> Export[LMS / Git Task Server / CSV]

Current Status

  • OptiTeam: Vision & research phase (problem modeling, prototype solvers)
  • Team Genesis: Archived (no new development)

Future work includes building a unified UI for instructors and integrating outputs into Git Task Server or LMS environments.