Fair ways to pick a winner, a speaker or whoever does the dishes

Picking someone at random sounds trivial until people care about the result. A raffle at a school fair, the order of presentations, who washes up after a family dinner: once something is at stake, "I'll just choose" stops being fair, or at least stops looking fair.

For a list of options, a random picker does the job. You type the options, press the button, and that's it. RandoCue has a few versions of this. The Random Picker chooses from your own list. The Random Name Picker draws names without replacement, so a name that's been drawn doesn't come up again, which is what you want for a raffle with several prizes or for calling on students one by one. The List Randomizer shuffles the whole list at once, which is the quickest way to set a presentation order.

For two options there's the coin flip, and it keeps a tally of heads and tails. That sounds like a small thing, but it's handy in a classroom: flip fifty times and the class can watch the counts drift toward half and half, which is a gentler way into probability than a worksheet.

Whatever tool you use, the way you use it matters as much as the randomness. Show the screen so everyone sees the draw. Say the rules before you press the button, including what happens if the winner isn't there. And never redraw because you didn't like the result. The first time you do, nobody will trust the next draw.

Everything mentioned here sits on the RandoCue website next to a yes or no generator, a dice roller and a random number generator. They're free, there's no sign-up, and they run right in the browser, which makes them easy to pull up on whatever screen is in the room.