Is Block Planning the right option for me?

[Adele]

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?

[Liviu Lalescu]

Good morning, Adele,

Volker knows his StElTo, he can answer about that.

About FET Block planning mode, maybe like this:

Add FET days = real life subjects, and FET hours = real life time slots. Then, you add for each student add an activity for each of his choices. Additional constraints then.

I think you need to not add 5 times the same activities for the first block, but only once.

Liviu.

[Adele]

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?

[Volker Dirr]

Hi Adele,

if you use StElTo, then you only need the "normal"/"official" FET version.

It is difficult so say which one is better. I guess for small schools FET BlockPlanning is fine, but larger for lager schools StElTo + FET is better.

In Germany year 11 to 13 has optional subjects only. So the students choose 12 to 14 subjects.
All German school that I know split the problem into 2 parts (and they already done it like that in the last 40 years). Doing the block planning (most schools use Kurs42 (free, but German only and slow) or gp-Untis (very expensive)) and after that they do the timetable. So in fact like StElTo + FET.

The advantage of splitting it in 2 parts is:
- if it is solve able, then it is faster this way, since it simplify the problem very much.
- you can even split the tasks very easy on different guys. So each guy can care about the block planning for only a single year. While an other guy only collect the block results and do the timetable.

Disadvantage:
- it it fail, in theory, depending on your data set, there might be other possible solutions that only FET block planning can find.



If you use block planning in FET, then a single guy must in fact do all at once. It will be more difficult to find bugs and it will take more time to generate. On the other side it might find solutions, that can't be found if you split the task into 2 parts.


So I fear we can't answer which variant is better for you. Just try both an let us know your results.

[Liviu Lalescu]

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?

As I understood, each math or physics group will be unique at a time slot. So, you will have an activity with student StA in a certain FET day = subject and in a certain FET hour = real life time slot.

[Adele]

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.

[Volker Dirr]

This way did not want to work this year, where I have one activity for a block of subjects.

I don't understand that part. Even if there is a single subject per block only, you can do that by StElTo, even in fact that is unneeded, since it is trivial and you can even add such an activity in FET directly after you imported the other blocks from StElTo.
Maybe explain more detailed.

[Adele]

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.