I'm not asking for you or anyone to do homework. My interest is really whether this is a problem that fits a "family of problem types with an algorithmic solution". I have seen picking marbles etc and how many ways can you do X, but I found this particular problem more complex. Any advice as to how to approach the problem would be helpful. I do recognize there are 16 teams (4x4) in a solution and that with 8 participants, there are 28 unique teams. But it's not just selecting 16 out of 28.

A colleague has asked for assistance with the problem stated below. I have searched and tried to create a solution without success. Another colleague suggested I post on this forum. The preferred approach would be in msAccess/vba, but any advice appreciated. The problem: Given a set of N participants, divide the participants into teams of m members. There are a number of Activities that take place in Sessions. Assign Teams to each session*activity such that no participant/member is assigned more than once in session, and no participant/member is in same activity more than once. Each team can only participate in 1 activity.

For testing suppose there a 4 activities that occur in 4 sessions, and 8 participants in teams of 2.Is there an algorithmic solution for 4x4 and 2. The underlying question is--is there a scalable solution beyond 4x4 and 2?

Manually, with 8 participants A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H - there is a solution

......... Activities
......... 1 2 3 4
Session 1 AE-CF-DG-BH
Session 2 CG-AH-BE-DF
Session 3 DH-BG-AF-CE
Session 4 BF-DE-CH-AG