E10 - How to: Prioritise rooming

Modified on Thu, 14 Aug at 12:53 AM

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preamble
Settings > Rooms > Rooming Priorities
Rooms > Room allocations (CTRL-R) > Actionbar: Auto room

Preamble

Schools may want to prioritise room allocation to certain groups above others, such as senior above junior above middle school. Behaviourally challenged or support classes may also need to be roomed as a higher priority than others. Rooms allocated to wet weather PE might be the last priority in room allocation, as these are rarely actually used, unless perhaps it is raining, or there is theory work.

Settings > Rooms > Rooming Priorities

Specify auto - room assignment priority in a string format. Priority is coded in the sequence of terms, where first term listed is highest priority, and last term is last priority. Terms may be a year (7) or a year group (7D) which may be the behaviorally challenged or support group. Terms in brackets signify equal level priority. An asterisk before a faculty name signifies an exception, such as *PDHPE, which is often the last priority for room allocation.

Consider an example string:

"(7D, 8B, 9A, 10D), (12, 11), 7, 8, (9, 10), *PDHPE"

This means that the group of classes associated with 7D, 8B, 9A and 10D are all equally prioritised(slightly) above all other classes for rooming. The next tier is any senior class in Yr11 or 12. Then next priority is any Yr7 class, then any Yr8 class. Note that some groups of Yr7 and Yr8 have already been prioritised, so the terms 7, 8 here mean ‘all remaining classes in these year groups’ – at this priority level.

Then Yr9 and Yr10 are equally prioritised next due to the brackets. The *PDHPE means any class in this faculty has the lowest priority for room allocations, such as for wet weather rooming – that is less focussed on room consistency or other rooming aspects.

The priority string is used to apply a small additional penalty weighted score to classes being roomed, to encourage rooming to be done in accordance with the priority string specified. Note that the priority of rooming is a low level consideration only, and is more relevant when there are classes that have roughly equal scores for a given room against other criteria. The room priority string will be unlikely to force a class out of a preferred room for example. If the rooming criteria are roughly equal for a Yr 12 and a Yr 9 class and E10 needs to chose to between allocating a good room for the Yr12 class or he Yr 9 class, the Yr12 class will get the good room if it is specified earlier in the priority string.

Rooms > Room allocations (CTRL-R) > Actionbar: Auto room

Priority rooming weights are not user specified as a category. Instead, they range as follows :

0.5 : Any exception faculty, such as PDHPE (Wet weather rooming) - if only *PDHPE entered and nothing else.

1.0 : Default weight. If no rooming string specified, or if the class doesn't match any of the terms it gets priority weighted 1 (no effect).

2.0 : The highest weight for #1 priority classes (by year, group or faculty).

All terms in the rooming priority string are divided up evenly between one and two, the third term of six comma-separated terms will have a weight of 1.5 for example. This weight is then applied as a multiple to the subtotal score of the class, to derive the total score ‘by priority’.

When the auto room is executed, click on the score of any class to see the drill down window, which shows the priority value for that class and the total rooming quality score.