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Sorry, I took a bit of a break from the problem. So the constraints you listed above allowed me to get the continuity for teachers that are involved in the Junior courses.

Next problem....the dreaded ability of choice....

So I am trying to sort out how to have the senior grades achieve choice while FET optimizes the teachers that are available....I followed the example in the manual and using my Grade 10 for example ....

In Grade 10 the students must take Math, Science, Social, English, PE. They can then choose from either Sports Med, Art or Spanish....So I created 3 groups within the Grade 10 year titled Sports Med, Art, Spanish. I constructed activities for each (e.g. for the students that chose sports Med they got all the mandatory courses plus Sports Med....)

This worked but the issue is that the FET will not overlap...e.g my Sports Med group have their own dedicated teacher, Art has their own dedicated teacher etc...whereas it would be nice to have Sports Med and Art students take their Math at the same time with the same teacher to optimize the teacher's time. Is this possible....??

I am now thinking of trying the mapr (as my rooms = real teachers) but don't understand it's functionality yet. To me it seems like I can have my rooms=real teachers handle more than one group at a time allowing for overlap but the only option is to increase or decrease the number of activities taking place but then I could have every room=real teacher having double ups which I don't want (e.g. A teacher is then assigned Math 6 and Social 10 at the same time, and I don't want that).

Any overviews of mapr's additional functionality beyond just changing the maximum activities would be helpful or a neat solution to my problem using the original FET would be awesome.

Thanks again for all your help...

Ok so this worked nicely for my junior school which runs the same rotations for an entire year. I managed to have FET select teachers and ensure Spares by using a Dummy year/grade level  (called Prep) and splitting it into as many sections/divisions as there were teachers that needed preps. I turned them into activities and then constrained one to each room/real teachers....Not bad so far.

But, I then attempted to pick away at my senior school and I am trying to see if there is a way to use Day 1 and 2 as a semester 1 and 2....That way I can schedule students that are selecting their courses in the senior school while still maintain the junior school teaching assignments between day/semester 1 and 2 (e.g. same time on day/semester 1 and 2). I have this issue because we have teachers who teach in both the senior and junior school so they need to maintain their Jr. school assignment for a full year while switching out their senior assignments half-way through.

Hope that makes sense. Let me know if you have any insights...

Thanks a million

Or maybe add a dummy activity (no FET teachers, no FET students), preferred room that room.

I'm gonna give this a go and see what I can come up with.

But this way, you cannot have 2 or more activities in the same FET room = real teacher.

I haven't ran into a problem with this as a room that can only host one activity means that for that time period the real teacher/room is only available to teach that activity.

I do have another issue now though....how do I find a way so that the room has at least one free time slot in the day....this will allow for a real teacher/room to have a break.

Thanks for the reply!

I think I may have found the workaround without the mapr version. I have used the original FET and because our school utilizes almost the same class rotation each day I reduced the number of days in the week to one (as it will be the same order each day anyway). I then am using the room functionality to designate teachers (e.g. room = real teacher). I've tested with two grades (Grade 6 & 7) with success but I will let you know how it goes as I get more complicated when I will eventually have to incorporate options at the senior grades.

So I've managed to become moderately obsessed with the problem and I have figured out the use of rooms as a workaround to assign available teachers. The only thing I am trying to figure out is how to constrain the room = real teacher such that each day it is the same room = real teacher happening for that activity....Or in other words, the same teacher is dedicated to that section of the course all week. Let me know.

Hi there!

This software is pretty awesome. I have a similar request with respect to implementing this functionality. I would like to use FET to assign and establish all of the activities etc... and then have it choose teachers for each activity based on the qualified subjects. That way FET can solve the problem of allocating teachers and avoid teacher conflicts. I do have the custom mapr version but haven't quite figured out how to use the room functions as a workaround for this. Any further insight or the potential to create the teacher assignment functionality into another custom version would be awesome.

Thanks so much