Alternative use for FET help

[chipshilling]

Hi there!

I'm working on a mental health project which groups students struggling with similar issues (such as depression or anxiety) and organises a time of the week for them to meet up and talk together.

The problem exactly is this:

Students sign up as either an attendee (joins the course) or facilitator (helps run the group)

Sign-up data includes issues they struggle with such as depression, anxiety, eating disorder etc, the time of week they are available to meet and some other variables.

I want to create groups of 4/5 attendee students with similar problems with 2 facilitator students with similar problems/time availability, to have an overall group size of 6/7 students.

What do others think? Is this possible to do in FET?
I've been playing around using FET and setting attendees as students on the system and facilitators as teachers but not sure on the full capabilities of the software yet.

Thanks for any advice! 

[Liviu Lalescu]

Hello, @chipshilling , and welcome to the forum!

It is certainly not standard FET, but I'll try to think of tricks. It might include ideas from the dolphins trick (https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/forum/index.php?topic=1782.0) or from the music school (https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/forum/index.php?topic=3961.0) or from the mode Block-planning of FET. So please allow me some time for thinking. I like the provocation.

Meanwhile, maybe you could send us (here or to me personally by email if it is private) a pdf example of previous timetable(s).

[Liviu Lalescu]

I hope to bring good news (I created a very simple working file, attached below):

1) Use Block-planning mode of FET.

2) Add FET hours = Mon1...Fri5 (25 real-life time slots).

3) Add FET days = issues: void, D, A, E, DA, DE, AE, DAE (2^issues = number of FET days). We could change this, it depends on your preferences for the issues.

4) Add some constraints so that there are max/min meetings (in my example I put 2 both), and in each slot min/max Attendees/Facilitators/both (see my example attached below - dialog All time constraints).

5) Add not available for students (I added).

6) Add preferred issues for students (I did not add). For instance, you can add a constraint activities preferred time slots, student Att1 (neglect the warning), weight 20%, not preferred on a whole day. So this will be like 80% preferred on this FET day = the preferred issues. This might be a bit tricky, but please consider that a slot with X (red) in a preferred time constraints with 20% weight rejects the slot in 20% of cases. The slots with empty (green) are 100% allowed/preferred, and you can add as many constraints of this type for each students set as you want. You could also add an activity tag for some activities and use this tag for preferred times constraints.

7) Generate and see the All activities HTML timetable.

Neglect the warning about new FET version on my example (I work with the one on my hard disk).

Please let me know.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I forgot:

4.5) If you want a single meeting at any time, add 25 constraints activities occupy max time slots from selection, like in the newly attached file.

[chipshilling]

Thanks Liviu for help!

I will give this a try and see if I can get it working - appreciate your quick replies!

[Liviu Lalescu]

You're welcome!