Hi again.
My week has 5 days, 6 periods per day. I have a year that is split into 3 groups (6A, 6B, and 6C). Each group has 6 "specialist" lessons (taught with a different teacher) per week: 2xgym, 2xspanish, 1xart, 1x music. When they're not in a specialist lesson, they're in a "regular" lesson. So, per week, they have 24 regular lessons and 6 specialist lessons. Two of the groups, 6A and 6B, have gym at the same time. I want each group to have at least one specialist lesson per day.
In FET, I do not have the "regular" lessons entered. I make sure that the specialist lessons are spread out using min activites per day for a student set = 1. This works fine. Last year, I had the "regular" lessons entered, but because there are so many of them, it made it more difficult to generate a timetable.
The "regular" teachers of the groups 6A, 6B, and 6C need a time where they can prepare together, which happens when each class is at a specialist. I have solved that in the following way: a set of activities occupies max slots from selection, selected activities = 6A and 6B's gym lesson (1), 6C's Spanish lessons (2), 6C's art lesson (1), and 6C's music lesson (1), all slots selected, max occupied = 4. This works well.
The last piece of the puzzle is that I would like these overlapping specialist lessons to occur on Wednesday or Thursday. I cannot think of a way to do it, but I think there may be with tricks. One way to do it, without tricks, is to add all of the "regular lessons" to the timetable. Then I could have the "regular" teachers of 6A, 6B, and 6C each having 24 "regular" activities, and add a 25th activity with no students with all 3 teachers. The problem is that entering these 24 regular activities slows down the simulation a lot. (The full reason is that I have to do this for 7 year groups, not just 1, which adds up to a total of 25 student groups, not 3, and I actually have a ten-day week with 60 slots; I have just simplified for this example.)
Is this possible? Thanks!
In typing all of this out, I realized a simple way to solve my problem: create a dummy teacher, only allow him to work on Wednesdays and Thursdays, set him a dummy lesson that must have the same starting time as the grouped PE lesson (6A and 6B's lesson), and I think that works.
If anyone can think of a better way to do all of this, I'd love to hear :)
Quote from: ChicagoPianoTuner on May 11, 2017, 04:19:39 PM
The last piece of the puzzle is that I would like these overlapping specialist lessons to occur on Wednesday or Thursday.
Quote from: ChicagoPianoTuner on May 11, 2017, 05:05:58 PM
In typing all of this out, I realized a simple way to solve my problem: create a dummy teacher, only allow him to work on Wednesdays and Thursdays, set him a dummy lesson that must have the same starting time as the grouped PE lesson (6A and 6B's lesson), and I think that works.
If anyone can think of a better way to do all of this, I'd love to hear :)
If it is that simple as in your second post, why don't you add a constraint activities preferred time slots?
Yes, that would be easier. Just have 6A and 6B's gym class meet only on Wednesday or Thursday. I thought there was something simple I was missing.
Thanks :)