FET with five terms / for Finland (Five 7 weeks terms in a school year)

[Volker Dirr]

Visma is a commercial company. They got a lot of contracts with different states, schools, ... .For example Norway payed them 560 Million NOK to code a timetabling tool. It would be easy from them to code a FET timetable import. I bet less then 1 week for a single guy. But their clients will wonder why they pay Million of Euro for a function that they didn't code. So if they do that they won't earn so much money in the future.

[mikkojoo]

 
That's true.

FET rules anyway.

[Liviu Lalescu]

So, we got the the timetable done and I'm really happy and little bit proud for that.

I think we have too many and too complicated constraints there. There are more than 3000 of those now... Some of them are certainly overlaping and some are just stupid. But anyway, we got the job done, thanks to FET.

I noticed that Visma, the company behind Kurre, Wilma, Primus, made a donation to you some years ago. It would be so nice to have these funtionalities in Kurre or API / interface getting information from one to another. Now I needed to manually enter those five timetables to Kurre.

Thank you for your kind words!

Yes, Visma donated, but they did not find at that time that they could use FET for a Norwegian school (and I am not sure now either - I do not know if in Norway it is like in Finland). If mathmake and you, mikkojoo, would not have suggested this approach with 5x5 days per week, we would not find out FET can solve Finnish timetables.

Import/export should be really easy. FET writes the results as CSV and XML, or it could be customized to output the results in other formats.

Overlapping/redundant constraints sometimes slow down a bit the generation, sometimes are ignored (depending on their type). But probably the speed is not much affected by redundant constraints.

[Liviu Lalescu]

What do you think, should I make a prominent version, with the name like "FET-Terms" or "FET-Finland"? (which of those?), and put it near the most important FET custom versions? How to customize the number of terms and the number of days in a week?

[Liviu Lalescu]

I added an entry in the 10 most important custom versions: https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/custom.html . If you want further work on this custom version, let me know.

[mikkojoo]

Thanks again.
I will ceratainly continue working with FET - after vacation

In Finland there are
1) lower secondary schools with 5-term school year, 
2) but at least as many with 1 or 2 term school year.
3) Also elemntary and comprehensive schools are normally using either one timetable all year (with minor changes autumn/spring term) or 2-term timetabeling. 
4) Upper secondary schools are mostly in  5-term system.
6) In all Finnish schools nuber of days in a school week is 5.

I will be out of office until August now. After that the beginning of school year will probably take most of my time, but little bit later I will be back with this.

[Liviu Lalescu]

OK.

So 1 term is like using the official FET?

[mathmake]

So 1 term is like using the official FET?

Yes. Especially younger students (from 1st to 6th grade) has same timetable whole school year.

Markus

[Liviu Lalescu]

Starting with FET-6.0.0, released on 17 April 2021, FET-mathmake (terms, Finland) is integrated into the official FET. Please use official FET (6.0.0 or later).

[mikkojoo]

Ok, thanks for the information. I will download it.

We have been using FET-made timetable for all 5 terms here in our school. The timetable is totally ok, but we very quite in a hurry last summer ja noobs with FET. Now we are starting process for next schhool year.

BR Mikko

[Liviu Lalescu]

I wish you success, Mikko!

There are some typos in your post and I am not sure I understand it completely. But I think I understood the idea.

[mikkojoo]

I just wanted to say, that FET is really good! We had some problems, because we had to do timetables in such a short time - we were learning by doing, which is always great but quite hard.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I am glad it worked, Mikko! 

If this program proved useful to you, you could help by spreading the word about it, and letting people know that it is entirely free software, depending completely on donations.

[mikkojoo]

Hi again!
Now I'm just starting to make new timetable.
I have all the information imported as csv-tiles and evertything is fine.
My question is: I have 5 day in a week, 5 hours in a day, 5 terms in a year.

Something is wrong there, shoud I have 25 days or what?

[mikkojoo]

"You are working in the Terms mode and the number of days per week (5) is not equal to the number of terms (5) x the number of days per term (5) - please correct this before generating."

This is somehow wrong.