PlayerGroup lets students autonomously form their own groups directly from the activity page — no teacher intervention needed. It replaces manual group assignment with a self-service experience that works for any course format.

👈 Use the sidebar to jump to any section on this page.

🖼️ Screenshots

Browse with the arrows, the dots, or the left/right keys. Click the image to zoom.

‹

›

The activity appears on the course page like any other resource

1 / 4

✨ Features

• 👥 Group Creation: Students create groups with a custom name, description, and emoji badge — no teacher intervention needed.
• 🔐 Privacy Levels: Open, protected (password), and closed (invite only).
• 📨 Invite System: Peer invitations via Moodle’s native notification (bell + email for offline users); the invite picker is gated by moodle/course:viewparticipants and filtered to actively enrolled students, matching the same visibility rules as the rest of the course.
• 👀 View Members: Every group card’s member count is a button that opens a read-only list of that group’s members, with the founder marked as leader — on both the web view and the mobile app.
• ⚙️ Configurable Limits: Teachers set minimum and maximum members per group.
• 🗂️ Automatic Grouping: A Moodle grouping is created automatically — no manual setup required. Deleting the activity only ever removes the groups and grouping it actually created; if the teacher pointed it at a pre-existing grouping instead, that grouping and any groups not registered by this activity are left untouched.
• 🔒 Concurrency-Safe: Creating, joining, or accepting an invite into a group is serialised per activity instance, so two near-simultaneous requests (a double-click, or two devices) can never place the same student in two groups at once or push a group past its member limit.
• 🏆 Gradebook Integration: Grade awarded automatically when a student joins or creates a group; permanent even if the student later leaves.
• ✅ Activity Completion: Custom rule — student must join or create a group.
• 📊 Teacher Reports:
  • Activity Log: Audit view of the last 200 events (group created, joined, left, invite accepted), with CSV and Excel export.
  • Groups and Members: One row per member — group, privacy, role (leader/member), and name — for a full class roster at a glance, also exportable to CSV and Excel.
• 🔗 Groups API: Full integration with Moodle’s native groups and groupings, plus a public read-only API (mod_playergroup\api\group_info) other plugins can query — a single student’s group summary, or badges for several groups in one bulk call.
• 📱 Mobile App: Native support in the official Moodle app — create, join, leave, invite, view members, and manage your group on the go.

🎓 Educational Purpose

PlayerGroup is designed to:

• Foster collaborative learning through self-organised teams
• Reduce teacher workload in group formation
• Reward group membership as a gamification milestone
• Integrate naturally into gamified course flows

Suitable for:

• Project-based learning where students choose their own teams
• Labs and workshops with limited seats per group
• Gamified courses using the PlayerHUD ecosystem
• Any context where peer team selection matters

🕹️ PlayerGames Ecosystem

PlayerGroup is part of the PlayerGames gamification ecosystem for Moodle. Together, these plugins transform Moodle into an immersive experience:

• PlayerHUD Block: The core gamification component — XP, levels, inventory, ranking, RPG classes, and story engine. Displays the student’s group as part of their in-game profile via PlayerGroup’s public API.

  👉 https://github.com/jeanlucio/moodle-block_playerhud

• PlayerHUD Filter: Enables item drops via shortcodes inside course content.

  👉 https://github.com/jeanlucio/moodle-filter_playerhud

• PlayerHUD Availability Restriction: Restricts access to course activities based on the student’s current level or collected items.

  👉 https://github.com/jeanlucio/moodle-availability_playerhud

See the PlayerGames hub for the full plugin family.

📦 Requirements

🛠️ Installation & Configuration

1. Download the .zip file or clone this repository.
2. Extract the folder into your Moodle mod/ directory.
3. Rename the folder to playergroup (if necessary). Final path: your-moodle/mod/playergroup/
4. Visit Site administration > Notifications to complete installation.
5. Add a PlayerGroup activity to any course.

This plugin has no separate site-level settings to configure after installation — every setting is configured by the teacher when adding the activity to a course, as covered in Usage below.

📖 Usage

1. Add a PlayerGroup activity to your course.
2. Configure:
   • Minimum / maximum members per group
   • Grouping mode — create a new grouping automatically, use an existing one, or none
   • Allow students to leave their group, and whether an emptied group is deleted automatically
   • Delete groups on activity deletion — only ever removes groups and a grouping this activity actually created; a pre-existing grouping pointed at via “use an existing grouping” is left alone
   • Foundation reward — grade automatically awarded to every student who joins or creates a group
3. Students open the activity and create a group (name, description, emoji badge, privacy level) or join an existing one — open, password-protected, or by accepting an invite.
4. From any group card, students can:
   • Click the member count to see who is in that group, with the founder marked as leader
   • Invite an enrolled colleague who has no group yet (only shown to students who can also see the course participant list)
   • Leave their own group, if the teacher allows it
5. The activity completes and the grade is awarded automatically the moment a student joins or creates a group.
6. Teachers get two report tabs from the activity page: the activity log (who did what, when) and groups and members (a full roster, one row per member) — both exportable to CSV and Excel.

🧪 Automated Tests

PlayerGroup ships with a PHPUnit suite covering business logic, web services, reports/exports, the renderer and mobile app output, the public API, and Privacy API compliance, plus a Behat suite for browser acceptance. Every CI push runs against the full matrix (Moodle 4.5 → 5.x, PostgreSQL & MariaDB).

PHPUnit — By Area

vendor/bin/phpunit --testsuite mod_playergroup

Overall line coverage (moodle-coverage, PHPUnit + Xdebug): 80%.

Behat — Acceptance Tests

php admin/tool/behat/cli/init.php
vendor/bin/behat --tags=@mod_playergroup --profile=chrome

Full test-by-test breakdown and coverage table →

🔐 Security & Compliance

• Capability-based access control (mod/playergroup:creategroup, mod/playergroup:view, mod/playergroup:manage, mod/playergroup:manageinvites)
• Every group operation is scoped by activity instance — a group ID or invite ID from another activity, or another course, is always rejected rather than trusted
• require_sesskey() protection on all state-changing operations; AJAX calls are validated by Moodle’s core/ajax dispatcher
• Group creation, joining, and invite acceptance are serialised per activity instance through \core\lock\lock_config, closing a check-then-act race that could otherwise let two concurrent requests place a student in two groups or push a group past its member limit
• The invite picker only lists actively enrolled students and is gated by moodle/course:viewparticipants, so it never becomes an alternate route to participant information a course has deliberately hidden from students
• Group passwords are stored with password_hash() and verified with password_verify(); the stored hash is never returned to the client
• Deleting the activity only ever removes groups and a grouping it created itself — never a pre-existing grouping (or its other groups) the teacher pointed the activity at
• Moodle External API compliant
• Full Privacy API implementation — data export and deletion supported
• Backup and restore support, including safe ID remapping across a course duplication or restore

📄 License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3).

Copyright: 2026 Jean Lúcio