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I never imported the students into FET before. I did the generation of blocks in StElTo and then built blocks/lines based on that in FET. I would create one Activity:
Subject: Gr9L1: MATH/PHYS/CHEM/ENG
Teachers: TeacherMath, TeacherPhys, TeacherChem, TeacherEng
Students: Grade 9 (Year)

With building it like this, each individual year worked, but when I put it together with all the constraints, it no longer worked as grade 9 and 10 share many teachers and there was just not availability at the same time for all the teachers. THat's when I did the import from StElTo with student names for the first time and could get a working timetable in FET.

I have used StElTo in two different ways. IN the past I used it to create blocks for me and then I would schedule activites for a grade, for example Maths/Phys/Chem for grade 10 for 5 periods and add all 3 students in there. This way did not want to work this year, where I have one activity for a block of subjects. I changed for the first time to schedule students in FET and it worked well enough, but difficult when students move between groups when changing subjects as they are no longer in blocks, but scattered, like Maths/Phys/Chem used to all be at the same time, now only some lessons overflow as I scheduled them separately.

I am not sure how to do the block planning in FET as I don't understand it, but will try and play around and ask questions here as I go along. Thank you.

Thank you for your reply. But what if there is 3 or 4 different maths or physics groups, how would it decide which student will have maths/physics in which group?

Good morning,

I have read through the thread on block planning and am not sure if this is what I am looking for. I have used Stelto to plan our blocks in the past and want to know if this is something similar. I have the following scenario I want to solve and want to understand if it is possible with FET.

Students give us subject choices and we want to plan blocks with their choices. IN other words, I want to say that in grade 9 students will go (at the same time) to Physics, Chemistry, Maths and English - they go there 5 times a week and let's call this block 1. During block 2 they go to Physics, Maths, French, Economics, Accounting, during block 3 they go to Chemistry, English, Design, Geography and Maths.

Each student will have one subject they attend in each block, so student A might have in the three blocks Physics, Maths and Geography, another might have Chemistry, French and Geography and another English, French and Maths.

I just want to plan how the blocks are structured based on the subject choices, in other words, which subjects run together and how to structure it in the timetable.

I hope that is enough information.

Is FET a better solution or should we use StElTo and import that into FET?

Hello, Adele,

There are both, of course: fet-7.7.0/examples, and Help > Block planning.

Thank you!

Is there documentation regarding block planning or sample files. I have always created an "Official" timetable or used one that was previously created. A help file or sample data for block planning would be very helpful, thank you.

Thank you for the feedback, Volker. I will send you an email regarding to the cost of StElTo as I can't find that information online.

Good day,

I have been using StElTo and FET for some years, but have never used the import functionality. I saw Volker's video and imported it, but I am not getting all the subjects imported. It says the import is successful, but I have students with 7 subjects and their timetables are only showing 3 or sometimes even only 1. I am not sure how to export the StElTo file to show here, but I've attached the very basic FET file that I've imported. All these students should have 6 or 7 subjects. I've also attached a screenshot of the StEltTo elections/votes as well as the generated timetable in FET.

Any suggestions on what I am missing or where I am going wrong?

Good day,

Is there a way to structure StElTo to split a line in two? For example, some lines require 6 periods and other require 3. Is it possible to split the 6 lines into matching two with 3 periods eacch? Does it make sense?

Apologies, I meant to say 35 periods a week.

Good day,

I have a scenario where students to go most of their classes in lines, for example, there are 6 lines with about 7 subjects in each line. They go to these classes 5 times a week. They have 30 lessons in total a week. Let's say that they have 3 other fixed periods, like test and assembly, it means that the timetable is filled to 28 lessons with 2 free lessons. They have 6 classes, but the way I've built it is by making one timetable for the entire group. This all works fine. Now I want to add the last two periods, for a subject called Skills, but the problem is that it is the same subject and the same teacher, split into 6 different groups. Does that make sense? In my opinion that is not possible.

Example:
Line1(5), Line2(5), Line3(5), Line4(5), Line5(5), Line6(5), Other(3), Skills(2)

Each line has 7 different teachers, the "Other" subjects are seen as a group with all teachers, Skills is one teacher for all 6 groups/classes.

By the way, I've created the lines using StElTo and then just created a subject in FET named Line 1 with all the required teachers.

Is there a way to solve this?

Thank you for your replies Vangelis and Volker

Volker, I'm not trying to solve a substitution problem, I just want an "admin" period for a teacher per day and decided that the best way was to actually create 5 admin periods with minimum 1 day between activities and added no students to the activity. In that way, it ensured each teacher had an admin/free/gap lesson.

After the timetable generated, I just opened the generated FET file, which contains the "Admin" periods and removed them, leaving a gap every day.

Thanks again for your reply.

Well, in fact you are wrong.
If you set max 7 hours per day, then it might happen that a teacher always have got free the last period on Monday to Thursday also. So the only difference between that 4 days and Friday is, that the free period on Friday will be 100% the last one, while on the other days the chance is below 100%. I don't know your dataset, but if the students don't have got Monday to Thursday always 8 hours per day (and I guess that is not the case), then the chance for a teacher to have free the last period on Monday to Thursday is very high! Probably close to 95%!

You can force to have a free period on Friday on several ways. There are a few variants for it. But please rethink about the problem I wrote above first. In my opinion you shouldn't add such a rule, it sounds like you only want to force teachers to stay in school, even most of the time they have nothing to do in their gap time.

In our setting teachers are always at school, irrespective of whether they have class or not. I am trying to be "nice" to ensure they have a "gap" on a Friday somehwere, in other words, not working every lesson there is. And yes, they will have the last lesson "free", but by that time they're home already. I just want them to be able to have one admin period during the day at school.

We are running a timetable of 5 days and I want each teacher to have one period (hour) "free" per day. This is easy to implement, but there is one day (a Friday), where we have one less period.
Monday - Thursday 8 periods
Friday - 7 periods

If I implement max 7 hours per day, then some teachers end up not having a free period on a Friday. Is there a way around it?

Thank you,
Adele

Hi everyone,

I've got a scenario where I've got a timetable that takes quite a while to build, but I've got a new requirement where a group of students can go to any of two teachers, not a specific teacher. So for a practical lesson they can go to either Teacher A or Teacher B. Is there a solution to this in FET Timetabler? If I specify a specific teacher, it doesn't build (I've let it run for over 5 hours multiple times), but without that constraint it does build.

Any help or guidance are appreciated.