Build the room once.

Step 01

Open it and start

No signup wall.

Type the address and you are in. No account, no email address, nothing to install, and no trial to start.

Name your first room, add a room number if your school uses them, and you land in the editor with an empty canvas.

What it says on screen

• No rooms yet. Name your first one above and start arranging desks.
• Room name — e.g. Grade 5 Homeroom
• Room number (optional)
• Create your first room

Step 02

Build the room

It ends up looking like your room, not a grid.

Drag desks out of the palette: on their own, in pairs facing each other, in pairs side by side, or as a pod of four. Pods arrive pre-made rather than being assembled desk by desk. Your own desk goes wherever you actually sit.

Rotate a desk, or marquee-select several, group them, and rotate or duplicate the whole group at once. The FRONT badge pinned to the top of the canvas is what front-row rules measure against.

The horizontal / vertical switch reshapes the room rather than spinning it — desks scale into the new proportions and the front wall stays the front wall. Nothing needs saving; the toolbar pill goes back to Saved on its own.

What it says on screen

• Open Layout
• Desks
• Rotate group
• Fit to screen
• Saved

Step 03

Add your class

Twenty-four names in under a minute.

Paste a class list straight out of a spreadsheet — a header row carries a tag column through with it, so tags like IEP or EAL exist without anyone defining them first. A CSV import and a downloadable template are there for anyone who wants the shape up front.

Typing a name by hand works too. A comma already means last, first in a typed list, so tags use a hash instead: Priya Patel #IEP.

Tags are labels you invent, not a fixed list — and they decide what rules you can write in step five, because a rule is written against a tag or against a student.

What it says on screen

• Open Students
• Paste a class list
• Import CSV
• Download CSV template
• Manage tags

Step 04

Fill the seats

The whole class seated at once.

Switch to Seating and press Auto Fill. The button reads Seating… while it runs, and the room fills.

Nothing is locked afterwards. Drag one student onto another's seat and they swap. Once everyone has a seat the button renames itself Shuffle — same run, honest name, since there is nothing left to fill. Press it again for a different arrangement, or undo back to the one you liked.

What it says on screen

• Auto Fill
• Seating…
• Shuffle

Step 05

Set the rules

The reshuffle works around what you know about your class.

There are five kinds of rule, and the app states each one in its own words: Keep apart — none of these students should sit adjacent to each other. Keep together — these students should sit adjacent to each other. Front row — student must sit in the front portion of the room. Near teacher — student should sit close to the teacher's desk. Sits alone — no other student should sit adjacent to this student.

Pick four students at once for a single keep-apart and it holds for every pair inside the group. Near teacher measures from wherever you dropped your own desk, so working from the back of the room still gives sensible answers.

Pinning is the override for the student whose seat is not negotiable. Set the rules once and every reshuffle from then on works around them.

Being straight about the limit: Auto Fill weighs every rule and returns the best arrangement it can find, not a guaranteed one. Give it rules that cannot all be true at once and it will still seat everyone rather than give up — and it tells you which rules it had to break instead of hiding it.

What it says on screen

• Open Seating Rules
• Keep apart
• Keep together
• Front row
• Near teacher
• Sits alone

Step 06

Print it, or hand it to a sub

Leave with something on paper.

Export for Sub (PDF) is the one that matters at 6am on a sick day. PNG suits a slide or a staff chat, PDF prints and tapes up by the door, and Export as both saves the pair in one go.

The teacher / student view toggle changes what the canvas and the roster show: teacher view puts a coloured tag dot on each desk, student view drops the dots. Exports match whichever view you are in. Names are on the chart either way — that is what the chart is for.

What it says on screen

• Export as PNG
• Export as PDF
• Export for Sub (PDF)
• Export as both

Step 07

Duplicate for your next section

Build the room once, swap the class.

Duplicate a room and every desk, every group, the room's orientation and the whole tag palette come across exactly as you built them — with the seats empty and the roster clear. Paste the next class list, Auto Fill, done.

What does not come across: rules and pins are per room, so write the ones this class needs. Better to say that here than to have you find out in September.

What it says on screen

• Duplicate

Step 08

End of the year

Come back in September and it is all still there.

Rename a room, or change its number — classes move rooms, the drawing does not have to. Archive last year's homeroom and it leaves the list without a confirmation scare.

Archived rooms keep everything. Expand the archived section, restore one, and the furniture, groups and tags are intact. Archive is for last year; delete is for mistakes.

What it says on screen

• Show archived (1)
• Duplicate

Step 09

Nothing you type leaves your device

The question a principal asks first.

No account, no email address, no student data on a server. Build a room, add the class, run Auto Fill — with the network tab open the whole time, and nothing carrying a student name goes anywhere.

The trade is worth stating plainly, and the app states it in the same words on the dashboard: rooms stay in this browser until you delete them or clear your browsing data. On a shared staff computer, anyone using the same browser profile can see them.

Three things do leave, and the network tab will show you all three. Mapr counts that someone arrived and that someone built a first room — two event names, nothing attached. If it crashes it sends a technical report: what broke, which browser, and the shape of the room, with every name stripped out before it goes. And every five minutes, and whenever you come back to the tab, it asks this same site which version it is serving, so a tab left open for a term does not keep running an old build — that one sends nothing at all, and the answer is a version number.

That list is the whole of it, and the privacy policy names each one. If you find a fourth, that is a bug in the page and worth telling me about.