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Question

Desperate! Software recommendation to come up with schedule

Sep 15, 2014 6:32PM PDT

Hi all,

Am currently planning a center schedule for students in the following format:
<Monday> Rm1 | Rm 2| Rm 3| etc
Student 1| Student 2 | Student 3 | etc
Basically, I have 12 rooms to fill in with ~ 35 students for each day(Monday to Sat) over a period of 4 months; students should be allocated to all rooms and have a similar amount of time spent/slot allocated in the schedule.
Planning this in excel is a nightmare, is there any software recommendation that does this instead? Any help is really appreciated as we have been doing this for past few years manually and it really cuts too much on productivity.

Thanks in advance! Happy

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: planing
Sep 15, 2014 6:44PM PDT

Seems you need to hire a programmer or company to make something. Possibly in Excel (with a lot of macro's), possibly in Visual Basic or Java. If you want a web-based system (so the students can see their schedule after logging in) in their browser, there are many more technical options.

It seems an interesting small project. If the university you work for has an IT department, it might be a good project for one or two of their students.

Kees

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Answer
Seems simple
Sep 15, 2014 11:33PM PDT

Seems simple. You've got 12 rooms, 6 days, so one easy method is just have kids switch rooms half-way through each day. The 35 kids over 12 rooms won't work out evenly, so you may have 3 kids/room instead of 2, but this is assuming you want an equal distribution across all the rooms. Or you could just only open say Rooms 1 and 2 on Monday, put roughly half the kids in Room 1 and the other half in Room 2, have them switch at lunch or some convenient mid-point in the day. Tuesday you change to rooms 3-4, rinse and repeat until you get to the next Monday when you start all over again.

The room to student ratio seems quite low, so it doesn't make sense to have all rooms open all day unless you're only going to have 2-3 kids in there at any given time given the details you provided. So I'd give the people in charge of 8 of the rooms a free day one day out of the week to catch up on paperwork or help out in other areas. Then you just have two adults in each of the two open rooms per day. And you rotate it so if say Room 1-2 is open you have the people from rooms 5-6 helping out. Then the next day the people in room 1-2 get a free day while the people in rooms 3-4 and 7-8 are "on duty". Go every other one so that it shouldn't happen that people need to be "on duty" 2 days in a row. With the details you gave, it seems like you've been overthinking this problem and overlooked a number of rather simple solutions right in front of you.