Built for a projector, not a laptop

Most spinner sites are designed for one person looking at a screen from arm's length. A classroom is the other case: thirty people, six metres, and a projector that flattens contrast and eats thin type.

This page opens in presentation mode for that reason. The secondary controls go away, the wheel takes the room, and the result is lifted into a high-contrast panel rather than left as text on a page. Escape leaves — the key you already expect, not a small button you have to find while everyone watches.

Turning the whole site dark for a projector is the common trick and it is the wrong one. A projector is already losing contrast; recolouring the page loses it twice.

The countdown, and why it can be cancelled

In presentation mode the spin counts three, two, one before it goes, and any click during those three seconds cancels it.

That exists because of a specific and slightly embarrassing moment: you press the button, realise you meant to switch to the other class, and have to explain to the room why the wheel is spinning anyway. Every competitor makes that moment unavoidable. Elsewhere on this site the countdown is off by default, because waiting three seconds to decide what is for lunch is not suspense, it is lag.

Thirty on a wheel

A class of thirty is the number this whole page was sized around, and it is the reason the wheel draws thirty sectors rather than the twenty-odd that would let labels be comfortably large.

A classroom picker that cannot fit a class is a picker that does not do its job, so the sector count was set from the promise rather than from what looked tidy, and label sizing was made to work at that count instead. Names shrink to fit their own slice and stop at a readable floor, at which point they shorten rather than shrink further — an unreadable name on a projector is the same as no name.

Several classes

Save the list you have with a name, and switch between them from the panel. A Tuesday class and a Thursday class are different lists, and re-pasting one every lesson is the kind of small friction that makes people stop using a tool.

They are kept in this browser. That means the staffroom machine and your laptop do not share them, and clearing site data clears them — a real limitation of having no accounts, stated here rather than discovered later.

Instead of the Google spinner

The search-results spinner is fine for six words and nothing else: no lists, no saving, no projector mode, and no way to work through a class without repeats. This is that job done properly, and it is still free, still has no ads on the wheel, and still asks nobody to sign in.