Our school has students split into either M, W or Tues, Thu schedules. They are off the remaining 3 days of the week for self-paced studies. Has someone setup a schedule like this before?
I never heard of this setup before, and I did not do a similar schedule before, but it is very easy:
1) Add a constraint break (this is for all students and teachers) or more constraints students set not available on Friday.
2) For each student, add two (sub)activities with duration = n_hours_per_day, min+max days between them = 2.
Instead of (2), if you really need, it is possible a customization for your exact case, so that you won't need to add additional activities and constraints.
PS: It is not recommended to show your email publicly. If you want, I can help you with this, on the forum.
Thanks! That is a good suggestion. We will try this this week.
You are welcome! Please let me know if/how you succeed.
Let me clarify:
1. Teachers teach all 4 days.
2. Students are the ones that attend Mon/Wed or Tues/Thurs. We have found out that we do NOT need to accommodate for families to make sure all the families kids attend on the same days. It might be that the child in 12th grade attends Mon/Wed and the 4th grader attends Tues/Thurs.
Based on this, it looks like we only need to setup Data > Time Constraints > Students > All Students, right? If we say maximum 2 days, we get that, but we are saying maximum 2 days where the days are either Mon/Wed or Tues/Thurs. How do we do this?
Thanks,
Brian
Hello, Brian,
I attach an example file of what I meant with the trick.
It is possible to make a custom version, avoiding the need to add many EMPTY (dummy) activities and min+max days = 2 between EMPTY (dummy) activities. But if you use the trick as in my file you will always be able to use the latest official FET version.
PS: You can totally eliminate Friday from the timetable (make the number of FET days = 4). It might be slightly faster.
Liviu.
OK. Let us look tomorrow.
When you say a "custom version" what does this mean within the application? We are seeing some very different things in the Activities modal that maybe is this customization?
We see the 1/2 next to the ID that we are guessing is a Duration? Is one of these Mon/Wed and the other Tues/Thurs?
I guess I am not understanding how this works. If you can point this out in the manual, I can probably figure it out.
Thanks,
Brian
The file I sent you above is in the official FET version. I needed to add EMPTY (this is the subject) activities, to occupy M+W or Tu+Th. A custom version requires more work from me, is done especially for this case, and is derived from a stable FET version. It will make automatically the students work only M+W or Tu+Th, without the need of EMPTY subject activities.
1/2 means duration/total duration.
You need to also see All time constraints dialog.
Generate and see the students' timetables.
Volker might be able to show you the corresponding sections in the manual.
We have created one year 2024-2025 with 8 groups for Grade 5-12. We have decided to focus on Grade 7 for now. We have created the Subjects for all Groups them and created Teachers for all Groups. We created an EMPTY Subject per your suggestion. We created a split Activity for each of the 7th grade classes as well as a split with no teachers for the EMPTY subject.
We created a Max days time constraint for the EMPTY Activities as well as the Break time for Friday.
When we attempt to Generate a new timetable, we get the two errors below:
http://development.servicead-in.com:8080/tmp/2024-03-26_10-53-42.jpg
and
http://development.servicead-in.com:8080/tmp/2024-03-26_10-56-17.jpg
Can you tell us how to proceed? If I remove the EMPTY activity, we are able to run, but we need this to have students scheduled for either Mon/Wed or Tues/Thurs.
1) FET "years" are real-life "forms" or "grades". You might prefer to add a FET year = "7" or "Grade 7".
2) I cannot see your attachments/pictures? in your post.
3) I need your fet file. Send by email if private.
Let me update the FET Years. I updated the image locations so you should be able to see now. As soon as I have the Years fixed, I will rerun and if the issues persist, I will send the FET file.
The years thing I recommended you is just aesthetic and for future data. The problem will surely persist. So I would recommend you to send me the current fet file, if possible.
I have sent FET via email. Pls confirm receipt. We know the Years change would not fix anything, but we wanted to get it consistent before sending it to you. We put your example side by side and are not seeing the issue. Keep in mind that we only implemented one Year in this example.
I just answered. You have 16 real hours assigned for Grade 7, but only 2 free days, with 7 hours each. 16 > 2*7, impossible. Maybe if you show me last year's timetable, by email, it will be clear.
You might want to add overlapping groups in Grade 7? You need then to use the year division by categories.
We did the split of each subject per your example which is the 8X2. So we should remove that split of each of the Activities?
My example contained 8 hour per day. Your example contains only 7 hours per day. So you can add maximum 14 hours in total for the real activities.
If you deactivate any 2 real (sub)activities in your file, it will solve.
If you have for instance mathematics taught 2 times per week, 1 hour on one day D and 1 hour on day D+2, it is recommended to add split 1+1. So, you might want to add 7 split activities, each one split into 2 (sub)activities, for each independent students set.
It is 23:25 here, I might go to sleep, I am not sure I will reply soon to further inquiries (but I might).
Sorry getting so late for you. We work most of the night so we can catch-up early your time. I see the issue... The school has two potential teachers for Life Science and 2 for Speech so we entered them separately. Should both teachers have been entered for that one Activity? I thought you only did this when they co-teach.
Don't worry! :)
I am not sure I understand exactly. It should work if you add two teachers in an activity and only input Life Science and Speech once. FET will consider co-teach, but you will think of them as splitting year Grade 7 into two groups.
You could also add two groups in Grade 7, and add for each one a different teacher in Life Science and Speech. In this case, you might need to add some constraints activities same starting time (day+hour), if Life Science and Speech for Grade 7 should be simultaneous.
OK. We were making some progress. We added 7th, 8th, 9th and now 10th grade, but after running schedules after adding 10th grade we noticed that 8th Grade switched to Mon/Wed while all other grades are on Tues/Thurs. As we have discussed we want to just do Mon/Wed or Tues/Thurs and then we will duplicate the days for now. What would suddenly cause the switch and how can we add constraints to lock this in? I am emailing you are latest FET file right now.
I answered by email. You just need to add same starting time for EMPTY activities.
But I don't understand why you need to add 5 days in FET and use tricks, when only 2 days would be very easy.
OK. Got file and it works. We setup with 5 initially thinking this is the way to go. I will look at 2 days once we get this working using the trick constraints and the new ones you posted for start time.
I sent you another variant, by email. You can make an activity EMPTY(Grade 7, 8, 9, and 10), and you don't need same starting time anymore.
It is easy to switch to 2 days per week, I think.
If you want the real activities A(A1,A2), A1 and A2 never to be on the same day, you need to make the min 1 days between activities A1 and A2 with 100%. You can do this with a single click in the min days between activities constraints dialog.
PS: If you unite EMPTY activities, as I wrote above, it is faster for FET (less activities and constraints).
Also, if you consider only 2 FET days, it is faster for FET.
Faster for FET - I mean the speed of generation, time to reach a timetable.
Will look at this, but pushing forward in the model that we now working. We had a discussion here this AM in general, but now we found an example with this school that forces us to deal with this...
How do you best handle a scenario where 6 of the 7 courses for a Year (11th Grade) is identical except for their science courses? The school offers a general Science class that is "11th Grade AP Environmental Science" and then their Advanced Placement course "11th Grade AP Chemistry". These courses are mutually exclusive. As we are scheduling we can get a number breakdown for the number of 11th Grade that goes into one class or the other. We must figure this out for this coming school year (2024-2025), but as the school grows this will be more complex if they offer these same two offerings for English so we would now have 4 possible groupings of students.
Thanks.
PS: As a maybe speedup, you can also consider min days between real activities = 2, 100%, instead of 1.
About the problem you wrote above, it might be very easy for FET: divide year "Grade 11" by 1 category with 2 divisions, or, in the more complex case, by 2 categories, each category with 2 divisions. There is a button there in the years dialog - "Divide...". If you have only 1 category, FET will add only groups in Grade 11. If you have 2 categories, FET will also add subgroups in Grade 11. You then need to add activities for the corresponding groups.
Thanks for your help all along with this, but I think we are missing some important concepts. We were pulled off for another project, but now we are back on this. We have grades 5-12 in this school and have roughly 40 kids per grade with half the students coming on Mon/Wed and the other half on Tues/Thurs. For now with suggestions above we are only scheduling the Tues/Thurs classes and will replicate to Mon/Wed. Effectively we are scheduling 20 kids per grade since our schedule is only for those 2 days.
Our optimal class size is 10 students so we created a 5A and 5B class thinking this is the way to do this. We thought all was running smoothly, but when we look at Grade 5 students with days horizontal we get http://development.servicead-in.com:8080/tmp/2024-04-19_10-17-12.jpg.
We have blurred out the teacher names, but as you can see we have the same teacher for 5A, 5B during the same period. What are we doing wrong in the setup to force 2 different class periods for 5A and 5B?
Thanks!
You are welcome!
I think you added both 5A and 5B to the same activity. You need to add two activities, one for 5A with its teacher and one for 5B with its teacher.
You might want to send me your fet file so I can have a look.
Excellent! That worked. We will make this change for all the other grades.
A few more unrelated questions that should get us going through the weekend to wrap this initial phase up:
1. How do I setup a Space Constraints to generally group our kids by age. For example we typically have our 5th and 6th graders in close rooms, 7th-8th close together, 9-10 close together and 11-12 together.
2. We have created some constraints for science classes with labs, but outside of that have no constraints. With no constraints like we want to introduce in #1 above, won't the system just assign the rooms? Right now the only thing that shows in the schedule by room are the rooms with the hard constraints (science labs).
3. We do not see a way to introduce actual student names to assign them into classes? Do you have this capability so we can generate actual class schedules? Also, we would want a way to mix up the students a little so they would not necessarily all follow 5A people around all day.
Thanks in advance for all of your help! This product is really good!
Thank you for your kind words!
1. This seems tough or very tough. Maybe an idea would be to put similar rooms in a single building and use building changes constraints. But I am not sure it will work. The only other alternative I see would be a new constraint type, in a custom version. I think it is a research problem, by which I mean a problem which is not routine and which might or not have a solution, and which is difficult. Maybe if you show us/me more details with examples I can make myself a better idea.
2. This is easy. In FET, if you don't constrain an activity to a room by preferred or home room(s), this activity will remain in an unspecified room. So, you could add an activity tag "AT anywhere" and preferred rooms for this tag in all your rooms.
3. In FET, you have years and groups, which can be overlapping, and subgroups, which are independent. You can define a subgroup = a real life student, and use in an activity either a year or more, or a group or more, or a subgroup or more, or a combination of these. You can create two groups to contain overlapping subgroups, if needed.
OK. Thanks...
1. Yes, in general they are separated by floors so I will call each floor a building and try this and let you know.
2. OK. I will try this.
3. So you are saying since we have Year=Grade 5, Group=5A, 5B, we can create subgroups that are each student, right?
You are welcome!
1. If you want 5A and 5B to be on the same floor, hmm... I see no solution using buildings constraint, because all building constraints operate only on each individual subgroup (if you add such a constraint for a group/year, it will be propagated to all its constituent subgroups, but act individually). Maybe I was wrong suggesting buildings constraint, but please also think yourself. Maybe that second approach with the customization would be needed.
2. OK.
3. Yes, and you can create additional groups "5A boys" to comprise all the boys from 5A. 5A and "5A boys" will overlap. You can use the feature to add an existing subgroup in a group with a double click: you add it with text initially in 5A, then with a double click in "5A boys". In an activity you can add more subgroups or this group.