E10 - Answers to many rooming questions

Modified on Thu, 14 Aug at 12:55 AM

Preamble

This documents answers frequently asked rooming questions.

Question 1: How to manually de-assign a room?

How do I manually de-assign a room, so the class has no room on that period? (just temporarily).

Answer: Press ‘R’ on your keyboard when focused on a lesson on a teacher’s timetable, this will open the room picker window. Then, click on the minus symbol of the focused lesson. This will de-assign the current room, and leave it ‘empty’, awaiting later assignment of a new room.

Question 2: How to ensure auto-room will grant the home room request?

The school wants all their teachers to get their allocated home rooms first and foremost, and say they will manually modify any cases where this might not be appropriate. How can we ensure auto-room will ‘almost always’ grant the home room request as specified.

Answer: Increase the weight of ‘Lesson not in teacher’s home room’, such as perhaps to 20 or more in Rooms > Room allocations (CTRL-R) > Actionbar: Auto room. This rule applies only where the class in question has the home room listed as a primary / allowable room option, not if it is a fallback, or excluded from that class. E.g. A Science teacher taking PE would not have the timetable program score the PE lesson as should be in the Science Lab.

Also consider reading How to: Set up Home rooms for teachers or students.

Question 3: How to share 1 room between 2 part-time teachers?

A school says that room H3 is shared between teachers COOPER and FARRUGIA, who are both part timers with FTE 0.6.

Answer: Set the room H3 as having a ‘HomeRoomOf’ for one teacher - e.g. COOPER in Rooms > Room data (F5). Then, go to all the classes for the other teacher ‘FARRUGIA’ in Classes > Class data (F6), and set RoomPref = ‘H3’. There is currently no specific way to setup a ‘dual’ or multiple teachers to a home room, though this has been discussed as a possible future enhancement (E.g. Map ‘a’ homeroom to each teacher, not ‘a’ teacher to each room). The workaround for now as above is to assign the home room to one teacher, and to all the ‘classes’ of the other teacher. This will slightly bias the HomeRoomOf teacher, but if you really wanted to be 100% equal / unbiased, you would use RoomPref in Class data (F6) for BOTH teachers, and not use HomeRoomOf in Room data (F5).

Question 4: How to ensure PDHPE prac and theory lessons on preferred or not preferred days?

A school wants the double period Yr8 PDHPE prac lessons to not occur on Sport days. Yr8 Sport is on Wednesdays. They say they do want the two SINGLE theory periods of these PDHPE classes to run on any day, possibly Wednesday - but never on the same day as the PDHPE prac lessons.

Answer: Setup a sub-class structure in Classes > Class data (F6) (Two different components). The prac lessons requiring doubles, and Periods = ‘-Wed’. This blocks the double prac period from Sport / Wednesdays. The other sub-class for the theory lessons has ‘NoDoubles’, but Periods is blank, as the PDHPE single theory periods are permitted to run on Wednesdays. Students and staff are assigned to the parent class.

Question 5: How to swap all classes of Monday period 1 and 2?

The school wants to swap all classes of Monday Period 1 with Period 2 in a completed timetable. They have asked you to retain the existing rooming of all classes being swapped.

Answer: A full column swap in the Master Grid F11 does not allow for retention of room assignments, so any pre-existing assignments would be lost if you swap period columns here. Instead, go to Grid > Swap roomed periods and drag the grey period column heading of one period MonA2 and drop it onto the grey period heading MonA1. See this article for further details: E10 - Swap roomed periods

Question 6: How to reflect room changes that have been made in teacher timetables?

A school has made a number of room changes to a file. This is the only changes they have made to the file since opening it. They want to communicate the room changes to staff, and have asked for a list of staff for whom the changes are relevant. They want to hand a new timetable to these staff, but ONLY to those staff who were affected by the dozen room changes made. The daily organiser has asked you for a ‘list’ of teachers which now have room changes, as they want to email them separately with a notice.

Answer: Use File > Compare files. Then select the report option ‘Timetable changes’ to produce a list of all changes, which includes a list of all teachers which have (e.g.) room changes. Select the option to print ‘Marked up’ timetables to produce timetables which reflect the room changes, shown on individual teacher timetables. The timetables produced will only be for teachers who actually have room changes.

Question 7: How to view a timetable for only the gym spaces?

I want to see a timetable that SOLELY shows the classes assigned to the Gym, and the Oval. The file has GYM1,GYM2 and OVAL1,OVAL2 as 4x room codes for practical PE spaces.

Answer: Use Rooms > Timetables. Use the filter option to select GYM1, GYM2, OVAL1 and OVAL2 all at once. this will show a ‘combined’ timetable of all four rooms.

Question 8: How to ensure no practical PE lessons on the first period?

PE occurs in the Gym. A school doesn’t mind PE lessons being on first period of the day, but would prefer these practical classes didn’t occur first period. They are aware that at least ‘some’ PE classes will need to run period 1, but just want to discourage most classes from this timeslot.

Answer: Go to the Rooms > Room data (F5) add the unavailable column via View > Unavailable. Specify for the Gym a preferred unavailability of ‘ (1)’. This will mildly discourage PE classes from being scheduled in period 1, as it will cause a preferred room unavailability clash. It will still be able to be placed in period 1 if need be, but just discouraged from this assignment.

Question 9: Why can't I see a Year 11 Photography class '11PHO'?

I can’t see a Yr11 Photography class ‘11PHO’ in the Room allocation screen.

Answer: This class is likely to have only one room option (the darkroom) or else be hard coded. In these cases, the class doesn’t appear in the room allocation screen. Only classes which have the ‘ability’ to be assigned rooms will appear in the Room assignment screen. This screen is designed to analyse and change allocations, so any ‘fixed’ assignments based from requirements are ‘already known’ and effectively designated.

Question 10: Why didn't auto room allocate home room D7 to teacher SMITH?

A file has specified a HomeRoomOf ‘D7’ for a teacher SMITH. But auto-room has allocated D7 to a different teacher, and SMITH has been kicked out of their home room that period.

Answer: The auto-allocation algorithm operates according to the users specified weights and rules. In this case, the ‘weight’ of the home room request may not be enough, and criteria for ‘Preferred room type’, or several other criteria may be regarded as ‘more important’, or at least in this particular instance. A science teacher may have Lab1 as their home room, but be kicked out when they are taking a junior science class, if there is a DIFFERENT teacher’s class needing a lab for that period. The trade off is should a Chemistry class get a lab (important), or the other teacher get their homeroom (also important). It’s the old ‘Can’t have cake and eat it’ problem - so E10’s algorithms do the best they can according to the priorities the user has set, or accepted if left as defaults. Users can easily rearrange this assignment manually, or else set the weight of teacher home rooms higher, or other criteria lower - to modify the assignments in these cases.

Consider reading the document How To: Set up Home Rooms for Teachers or Students.

Question 11: Why do I get clashes when I re-room?

If using the 'Rotations' (semesters) feature, there's a chance E10's auto-rooming algorithms will introduce room clashes.

E10's Auto room and Optimise rooming quality functions will do the rooming for rotation 1, and it will guarantee not to introduce room clashes in rotation 1. However, it might introduce clashes or some unroomed classes in rotation 2.

These need to be dealt with using the Rooms > Room allocations > Actionbar: Room new rotation auto-rooming feature, or with manual changes (discouraged). In both cases there's a chance that you'll have to move some classes from one room to another at the rotation changeover, even with classes that are not rotated.

It is easy get a summary of the changes made after using the auto-rooming for the second rotation, go to File > Compare files and select the file with the correct rooming for rotation 1.