SteveRichards

Hi all, I would appreciate you thoughts / advice here... As timetabler I've been asked to look into creating after school study registers that would appear on teachers timetables on SIMS. (The registers would follow already existing curriculum groups in year 11, such as "11xa/en") My own thoughts on how I could achieve that are that: I could create an additional 'Period 7' on the Nova model and then just build the newly required sessions. However I've read numerous warnings and golden rules about how I should NEVER change the model in the middle of an academic year and that this can cause massive problems. Someone has suggested that I could use alternative curriculum, however I cannot see how this would be helpful seeing as currently no period exists either for mainstream or alternative. Anyway, assigning an entire year cohort through alternative curriculum is just an unfeasible task. SIMS activities does exist for this purpose but it comes with a price tag, is untested and does not exactly have glowing reviews. I could just do it the old fashioned way with a spreadsheet/db based system. Any ideas appreciated but especially any feedback re points 1 and 2. Thanks.

Here is something that might be a good starting point https://lalescu.ro/liviu/fet/

Wow! What about virtualisation on a high spec multi-core? That way each core could have it's own scheduling thread.

Hi, I'm currently working on next year's timetable. This is now the second timetable I have produced and the first time I've done it on my own. I've been thinking a lot about how the auto-scheduler works and how to optimise for it and I cant find any info to answer some of my ponderings. For example, obviously, a computer with a faster processor will be able to try more solutions in less time but what about multi core processors? Is Nova T programmed to take advantage of multiple cores? Does it work particularly better with any other hardware configurations than others that people are aware of? Thanks...

Hi, I have some students in SIMS who have moved sides in their base band from "X" to "Y" and vice versa in certain year groups. When I look at the membership in certain blocks, say 11X English, I can still see the students who moved from X to Y. I've removed all their memberships in this group but their names are still being shown (even though they are not assigned to any classes in that block) Is there any way of permanently removing them these blocks so that their names do not show up at all anymore? Thanks.

Wow... No idea how I would start with that without using auto at least a bit. ... is there a simple way of seeing which teachers are clashing and preventing a lesson from going in a particular place? Anyway, I've tried manually building the schedule for year 9 and year 11 with soft locks on what I've scheduled and with one per day rule relaxed in some instances. I'm not entirely sure what soft lock does but I'm assuming the scheduler tries not to move those sessions unless it has exhausted every other possibility first. Every time something fails, I'm just resetting and then upping the search depth a bit and trying again. Now I'm just checking every now and again to see how it's going.

Hi, I've taken over timetabling for the first time and I'm working on a new timetable for a new school structure. I have successfully allocated classes to teachers, built and auto-scheduled a whole school timetable and now I'm trying to make an optimal timetable. Currently, many of our blocks are in the format of eg. Double, Single, Single. This is good in some situations, say to get an even spread of classes, but there are some year groups where students moving around the site is a cause of problems. I have tried in these cases remaking the blocks as Double Double and trying to schedule but auto scheduling is failing. What I've tried to do is tag and schedule my 'problem' years and first schedule only the double periods. After this across the school all I have left is single periods which (I thought) the scheduler would be able to place easily. Sadly some of these remaining singles fail to schedule, even after 48 hours or so processing. Is there any way to make Nova try to first schedule singles together as a double and if it fails, split them? Are there any other techniques I could try?