A colleague wrote to me saying: *I was wondering if one of you might be able to help point me in the right direction to obtain a solution of a problem that I have created for myself. * *I teach a sophomore level design lab in the ME department and I want to arrange the students in each lab section into teams of three students. I asked each student to provide a ranked list of the five other students who they would like to work with. * *I thought that there would be a "simple" algorithm that would allow me to create the teams from this information. It would appear that I am trying to solve a variant of the stable roommate problem in which there are triples instead of pairs and the ranking of preferences does not include the entire set. * Do any of you know of relevant literature? Jim