Hi all,
Very new to this - looking for a timetabling software that will ease a massive burden and save me and my team hours.
We run a small charity Music school (c. 260 pupils) which takes place on a Saturday and each student needs to take:
- 1 hour "theory class"
- 1 OR 1.5 hour "ensemble"
- 0.5 or 1 hour "individual instrumental lesson".
The theory class and ensembles are set by us looking at the child's level and deciding which one is the best for them (but we may have multiple classes of each level throughout the day) and we'd like to be able to choose which teacher a child goes with (to keep the children's same teacher from year to year).
I have had a play with the software, but currently unsure whether I would be able to get the software to respond to the needs of my school. Ie. how I create individual students and log which classes they need to be in for FET to generate a timetable. The 2.5 hours of classes also need to be fairly close together for each child (ie. only one 30 minute break if completely necessary).
Could anyone advise whether FET could be programmed to suit the needs of our school? More than happy to do the monotonous/repetitive tasks involved if I am able to get a result in the end!
Many thanks in advance.
Hello,
Maybe we can devise something for your case.
We may consider a FET hour to be a real 30 minutes period.
Each activity in FET needs to have a clearly specified duration. Maybe with some tricks we could achieve variable duration, but I am not sure.
If you have each activity as a clearly defined tuple (student, subject, teacher), then the things seem easier. You might be able to use the official FET.
If you have activities as tuples (student, subject) and need to assign them to teachers, then: There was recently a case which looked similar. See: https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/forum/index.php?topic=3961.0 (don't worry that the beginning is in German). Peter B. obtained good results with these tricks. Unfortunately, the final input file is private and I cannot share it with you.
There are useful constraints for both cases.
Maybe you also have some previous examples/data to show us.