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Hi again,

I want to add some more suggestions from my experience with FET.

- Multiple conditions. Maybe it's too difficult, but it would be very powerful to be able to combine constraints with logical operators (with, for example, "NOT" and "OR" would be enough). So it would be possible to implement conditions as: "if a teacher works some day in the afternoon, he wants to end up early in the morning", or "if a teacher works 2 days in the afternoon, he wants to have a free morning", etc.
- In "teacher interval max day per week" and "teachers not available times" constraints weight must be 100%. Why? I'm trying to translate teacers' preferences, for example a teacher who would prefer not to work from 8-9h. It's a wish, but if he has to work at this interval he could.
- A constraint for mutiple teachers, but not for all. A list like in the define activities dialog to be able to add several teachers. Because if you have to add a constraint for *almost* everybody, you have to add it manually for every one.
- In activities dialog, it would be better to display the information in a grid (like in an spreadsheet), and even to be able to update the cells clicking over them, without need to enter in the modify dialog. Also could be useful a copy-paste method in this grid, to duplicate them easyly. This idea could apply to other dialogs, as constraints ones.

Thanks for you attention once again,

  ßingen.

Hi,

after inputing almost all the data from my school, I would suggest some improvements for this great piece of software.

First of all, I must say I've used version 5.7.0 because it's the one that comes with the last version of kubuntu. I have read in the news sections the changelog and removed the only one that I've seen already implemented (the one referring to multiple activity tags for an activity), but sorry if I repeat something.

- Ther's no filter in "Activities not overlapping" constraint, so it makes hard to select them when you have a lot of activities.
- When filtering a group, there should be a checkbox to show all its subgroups. So, for example, it could be possible to show all activities of a whole year.
- Some constraints dialogs (for example "Activity preferred room", "Activity preferred starting time") are much wider than my screen (using kde 4.2, 1024x768 display, I can give more details if needed)
- It would be great FET to assign rooms to activities that have no constraint about it. Besides of avoiding to put manually a room for each activity, it would allow to check if there are enough rooms for everything. It would be useful to associate a priority range number to each room, so in case there's more than one option for an activity the one with the largest number would be choosen.
- In my school the timetable is divided in morning (from 8:00 to 14:30h) and afternoon (15:00 to 17:00h). In the morning there's a break from 11:00 to 11:30h. I have defined this break as an hour of the timetable, but not allowing activities for any set of students in this slot. The reason is to plan the surveillance of the teachers in this slot. There must be always 2 teachers looking after the pupils during this period, so I define activities without students. The problem is that if a teacher does not have surveillance at break time, it should not count as a gap. If I define this slot as break in "Misc time constraints" then I can not define the surveillance activities.
- The lunch break is therefore from 14:30 to 15:00 (I have not defined it as a slot of the timetable, because there are no pupils in the school, they are at home having dinner). As it's a short time, often is convenient for many teachers to avoid having class from 13:30 to 14:30 slot and from 15:00 to 16:00 slot in the same day. Maybe something like a constraint of incompatible slots for some/all teachers would do the trick (and could apply to other situations).
- We try that all the teachers work maximum 2 afternoons per week. This has been easy to define with "All teachers work in an hourly interval max days per week". But we try also that teachers who work two days per week in the afternoon to have a free morning. I don't know how to define this situation.
I have seen some custom versions of FET considering the morning / afternoon division. I have to read them carefully, but I think they are not exactly my situation. For example, we don't want the condition "Teachers can only have lesson either in morning or afternoon. never both"...

Thanks for your attention,

  ßingen.

Hi,

I'm newbie using FET, but first of all I want to congratulate and thank for the effort and the result.

I have to do the timetable of my school for the first time. I want to put an example of a year in our school.

First of all we have two groups, A and B, each one with its own classroom. The second category in importance is a small group of students with especial educative needs called the "diversity" group, with pupils from both groups A and B. I've created both categories: 1) A & B; 2) Normal & Diversity. So I have 4 subgroups: AN, AD, BN & BD. This special group takes apart classes of Maths, Catalan language and Spanish language, so when group A (Normal) is attending, for example, Catalan, group B is attending Spanish and Diversity group Maths. So the same teacher of each subject can have all pupils of this year. With a restriction of same day+hour it works nice in FET. No problem until here. The diversity division does not affect in any other subject than catalan, spanish and maths.

But then, in the same year, we have the following situations:
- Two hours a week all pupils of the year redistribute mixed in four groups to attend 4 different optative subjects.
- In every group (A&B), once a week, the pupils separate into 2 subgroups to attend english language, with different teachers of course. The other two hours of english language don't have this separation.
- The same happens once a week with Computers subject, but in addition, in the B group, a small group does Religion instead of Computers.
- Once a week, in a two hours activity in the lab the group splits again in a similar way, but doing two different subjects. While one half is doing Science, the other one is doing Technology, in different labs, with different teachers.
- Finally, in the B group, there is another small group, called "Wellcome", for students newcoming to spain, that in some subjects get out from the normal class to do a language immersion.

My problem is that if I try to define all these as subgroups, I get a lot of them, and I have to do it manually, because in the year division I can only define 3 categories. Also, I should print a timetable for each subgroup, I would like to have just one timetable for A group and one for B group. In the worst case I could admit two timetables for each group, considering the diversity division.

The other option I have considered after reading the manual and the forums is to define for each group and division with only one subject and several teachers, and then pseudo-activities to book the rooms with a same day+hour restriction. But the problem with this is how is displayed the information, when I print the timetable for each group. For example, which name should I put to these special subjects? It won't be clear in the timetable which teacher and where does which activity.

In my school they have been using a software called "gp-Untis" (not free) until now. I attach an html file (although when output in pdf it looks better) of how is displayed such a situation with this piece of software.

Thanks again,

  ßingen.