Wheel spinner: make a custom wheel and spin

Ways to use a wheel spinner

A spinning wheel turns any decision into a small event. The ticking slowdown builds suspense, and because the wheel chooses, nobody argues with the result. Popular uses:

• Classroom: call on students, pick a review question category, choose a brain break, assign class jobs, pick the next book or the reward for a full marble jar.
• Home: decide who does which chore, what's for dinner, which game to play, or who goes first.
• Learning games: put vocabulary words, math facts or history questions on the wheel and spin for the next one.
• Probability lessons: give entries different weights and have kids predict, then test, how often each one wins.
• Parties and events: prize wheels, team picks and raffles.

Making a custom wheel

Every entry is a row with a color square, a label, a weight and a delete button.

• Labels can be up to 60 characters. Long labels are shortened on the wheel and shown in full when they win.
• Colors come from Edulist's palette of ten bright, flat colors with black text, so labels stay readable. Tap the square to cycle through them.
• Weights run from ×1 to ×10. Most wheels should leave every entry at ×1.
• Paste a list replaces the wheel with one entry per line, which is handy for a whole class list.
• Shuffle mixes the order of slices; Reset brings back the starter wheel.

Give your wheel a title, like "Friday reward" or "Who reads next?", and it shows above the wheel, which is helpful on a projector.

How the spinner picks a winner

When you press Spin, the winner is chosen first using the browser's random-number generator, with each entry's chance equal to its share of the wheel. The wheel then spins several full turns and eases to a stop at a random spot inside the winning slice, never on a line. The ticking you hear is real: it plays each time a peg passes the pointer.

That makes the wheel a good probability tool. Ask kids to predict how many times out of 20 spins the big slice will win, then spin 20 times and tally the results. Results will wobble around the prediction, which is the lesson.

Full screen and keyboard

Click the expand button in the corner to fill the screen with the wheel. Press the space bar or Enter to spin, and Esc to exit. The winner appears in large type under the wheel. On phones and tablets, tap the center button to spin.

Saving wheels

Press Save this wheel under Saved wheels. It's stored with its title in this browser, and you can load or delete it later. Teachers often keep one wheel per class period and one for rewards. Wheels are never uploaded, so they won't appear on a different device.

Related free tools

If you only need to draw names, the random name picker is faster and includes a group maker. The dice roller rolls up to ten dice for games and has a math dice mode, and the flash card maker prints cards for the questions you put on your wheel. For a full game that teaches money, try the lemonade stand game.

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Random choices and saved data

The tool requests browser cryptographic random values where available and falls back to ordinary browser randomness if that API is unavailable. It is designed for classroom activities, not audited prize drawings. Repeated results are possible; an equal chance does not promise equal counts in a short session. Saved lists stay in this browser when storage is available. Clearing browser data removes them, and private browsing or blocked storage can prevent persistence. Use labels or initials on a shared device.