Splitting a school year up

[Bob Ahrens]

Can FET be used to generate a timetable that has all year activities and half year activities? For example, if Chemistry is taught all year through, but Religion is taught only the first half of the year, and the second half of the year a different subject is taught, French, for example?  By the same teacher, or a different teacher?

[Volker Dirr]

yes.
in normal case you enter the dataset of the first half year, generate and use it.
6 month later you just modify the dataset/activities a little bit for the second half, generate again and use it.

the second/advanced variant is to connect some activities that are used only in one half
of the year. in most cases you "only" need to think about some "activities at the same time". by that you only need to generate one timetable and can also use it in the second half.

if you are new in timetabling i highly recommend to use the first variant. as soon as you have more experience (about difficult of your dataset) you can think about using the second variant. don't forget that new teacher and/or teacher that will leave in the second half destroy all that ideas. so if you already know about that (don't forget old teachers, trainee teachers, ...) then you can think about the second variant.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Can FET be used to generate a timetable that has all year activities and half year activities? For example, if Chemistry is taught all year through, but Religion is taught only the first half of the year, and the second half of the year a different subject is taught, French, for example?  By the same teacher, or a different teacher?

Possibilities:

1) Following Volker's first answer, but with some additional ideas: have two files, one for the first half of the year, second file for the second half of the year. There are two separate timetables. Then, three two possibilities:

       a) The two timetables are independent/not similar/very different;

       b) For the second file, you keep common activities locked in place, and allow new activities to be placed in the remaining slots. This way, first timetable and second timetable are similar.

2) Single .fet file, containing a timetable for two weeks. The first week contains the timetable for the first half of the year, while the second week contains the timetable for the second half of the year. There is an entry here on the forum describing the tricks in this case so that the timetable for week 1 is similar to the timetable for week 2: http://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/forum/index.php?topic=351.0 , the only problem being that the rooms for the second week may not be the same as the ones for the first week.

[Bob Ahrens]

I will try some of the ideas here and report back.  Thank you.