We have a unique situation with class on M, W or T, Th... has someone done this?

[Brian Warner]

We did the split of each subject per your example which is the 8X2.  So we should remove that split of each of the  Activities?

[Liviu Lalescu]

My example contained 8 hour per day. Your example contains only 7 hours per day. So you can add maximum 14 hours in total for the real activities.

If you deactivate any 2 real (sub)activities in your file, it will solve.

If you have for instance mathematics taught 2 times per week, 1 hour on one day D and 1 hour on day D+2, it is recommended to add split 1+1. So, you might want to add 7 split activities, each one split into 2 (sub)activities, for each independent students set.

It is 23:25 here, I might go to sleep, I am not sure I will reply soon to further inquiries (but I might).

[Brian Warner]

Sorry getting so late for you.  We work most of the night so we can catch-up early your time.  I see the issue...  The school has two potential teachers for Life Science and 2 for Speech so we entered them separately.  Should both teachers have been entered for that one Activity?  I thought you only did this when they co-teach.

[Liviu Lalescu]

Don't worry!

I am not sure I understand exactly. It should work if you add two teachers in an activity and only input Life Science and Speech once. FET will consider co-teach, but you will think of them as splitting year Grade 7 into two groups.

You could also add two groups in Grade 7, and add for each one a different teacher in Life Science and Speech. In this case, you might need to add some constraints activities same starting time (day+hour), if Life Science and Speech for Grade 7 should be simultaneous.

[Brian Warner]

OK.  We were making some progress.  We added 7th, 8th, 9th and now 10th grade, but after running schedules after adding 10th grade we noticed that 8th Grade switched to Mon/Wed while all other grades are on Tues/Thurs.  As we have discussed we want to just do Mon/Wed or Tues/Thurs and then we will duplicate the days for now.  What would suddenly cause the switch and how can we add constraints to lock this in?  I am emailing you are latest FET file right now.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I answered by email. You just need to add same starting time for EMPTY activities.

But I don't understand why you need to add 5 days in FET and use tricks, when only 2 days would be very easy.

[Brian Warner]

OK.  Got file and it works.  We setup with 5 initially thinking this is the way to go.  I will look at 2 days once we get this working using the trick constraints and the new ones you posted for start time.

[Liviu Lalescu]

I sent you another variant, by email. You can make an activity EMPTY(Grade 7, 8, 9, and 10), and you don't need same starting time anymore.

It is easy to switch to 2 days per week, I think.

If you want the real activities A(A1,A2), A1 and A2 never to be on the same day, you need to make the min 1 days between activities A1 and A2 with 100%. You can do this with a single click in the min days between activities constraints dialog.

[Liviu Lalescu]

PS: If you unite EMPTY activities, as I wrote above, it is faster for FET (less activities and constraints).

Also, if you consider only 2 FET days, it is faster for FET.

Faster for FET - I mean the speed of generation, time to reach a timetable.

[Brian Warner]

Will look at this, but pushing forward in the model that we now working.  We had a discussion here this AM in general, but now we found an example with this school that forces us to deal with this...

How do you best handle a scenario where 6 of the 7 courses for a Year (11th Grade) is identical except for their science courses?  The school offers a general Science class that is "11th Grade AP Environmental Science" and then their Advanced Placement course "11th Grade AP Chemistry".  These courses are mutually exclusive.  As we are scheduling we can get a number breakdown for the number of 11th Grade that goes into one class or the other.  We must figure this out for this coming school year (2024-2025), but as the school grows this will be more complex if they offer these same two offerings for English so we would now have 4 possible groupings of students.

Thanks.

[Liviu Lalescu]

PS: As a maybe speedup, you can also consider min days between real activities = 2, 100%, instead of 1.

About the problem you wrote above, it might be very easy for FET: divide year "Grade 11" by 1 category with 2 divisions, or, in the more complex case, by 2 categories, each category with 2 divisions. There is a button there in the years dialog - "Divide...". If you have only 1 category, FET will add only groups in Grade 11. If you have 2 categories, FET will also add subgroups in Grade 11. You then need to add activities for the corresponding groups.

[Brian Warner]

Thanks for your help all along with this, but I think we are missing some important concepts.  We were pulled off for another project, but now we are back on this.  We have grades 5-12 in this school and have roughly 40 kids per grade with half the students coming on Mon/Wed and the other half on Tues/Thurs.  For now with suggestions above we are only scheduling the Tues/Thurs classes and will replicate to Mon/Wed.  Effectively we are scheduling 20 kids per grade since our schedule is only for those 2 days.

Our optimal class size is 10 students so we created a 5A and 5B class thinking this is the way to do this.  We thought all was running smoothly, but when we look at Grade 5 students with days horizontal we get http://development.servicead-in.com:8080/tmp/2024-04-19_10-17-12.jpg.

We have blurred out the teacher names, but as you can see we have the same teacher for 5A, 5B during the same period.  What are we doing wrong in the setup to force 2 different class periods for 5A and 5B?

Thanks!

[Liviu Lalescu]

You are welcome!

I think you added both 5A and 5B to the same activity. You need to add two activities, one for 5A with its teacher and one for 5B with its teacher.

You might want to send me your fet file so I can have a look.

[Brian Warner]

Excellent!  That worked.  We will make this change for all the other grades.

A few more unrelated questions that should get us going through the weekend to wrap this initial phase up:

1. How do I setup a Space Constraints to generally group our kids by age.  For example we typically have our 5th and 6th graders in close rooms, 7th-8th close together, 9-10 close together and 11-12 together. 

2.  We have created some constraints for science classes with labs, but outside of that have no constraints.  With no constraints like we want to introduce in #1 above, won't the system just assign the rooms?  Right now the only thing that shows in the schedule by room are the rooms with the hard constraints (science labs).

3.  We do not see a way to introduce actual student names to assign them into classes?  Do you have this capability so we can generate actual class schedules?  Also, we would want a way to mix up the students a little so they would not necessarily all follow 5A people around all day.

Thanks in advance for all of your help!  This product is really good!

[Liviu Lalescu]

Thank you for your kind words!

1. This seems tough or very tough. Maybe an idea would be to put similar rooms in a single building and use building changes constraints. But I am not sure it will work. The only other alternative I see would be a new constraint type, in a custom version. I think it is a research problem, by which I mean a problem which is not routine and which might or not have a solution, and which is difficult. Maybe if you show us/me more details with examples I can make myself a better idea.

2. This is easy. In FET, if you don't constrain an activity to a room by preferred or home room(s), this activity will remain in an unspecified room. So, you could add an activity tag "AT anywhere" and preferred rooms for this tag in all your rooms.

3. In FET, you have years and groups, which can be overlapping, and subgroups, which are independent. You can define a subgroup = a real life student, and use in an activity either a year or more, or a group or more, or a subgroup or more, or a combination of these. You can create two groups to contain overlapping subgroups, if needed.