E10 - Advanced: Using 'Includes' statement when generating Lines

This article explains how the Includes constraint is used.

Once Tertiary features have been enabled, the Includes constraint will be added as an additional constraint in the 'Class Constraints' table. 

The Includes constraint can be used to make the class lists of one class 'include' the class list of another class or classes.  Used in a single direction, the target class that should include the students from the other class should be listed in the 'A' column, while the source class(es) should be listed in the 'B' column.  In the case where there is 1 target class  (A) and multiple source classes (B), you will need 1 Includes statement for each source class.

A typical scenario is when a school wants their students doing Maths Extension to be together in one Mathematics class rather than distributed across a number of Mathematics classes.  Without the Includes statement, schools would have had to get their MAX students to choose a different MAT class when selecting their preferences, to separate them from the students just doing MAT and not MAX, or they would separate the students after the fact - which can easily be done, IF the school is planning on running Maths all on one line.

Using the class constraint "MAT:1 includes MAX" would ensure that the MAT:1 class would include the same students as allocated to the MAX class and without restricting all of their Maths classes to one line.  However, this single direction Includes statement means that the MAT:1 class could also include students who have only chosen MAT and not MAX, up to the set MaxS size set for the MAT classes.

To ensure that the MAT:1 class and the MAX class have identical class lists, excluding any additional MAT students, create another includes statement in the other direction.  i.e MAX includes MAT:1.  This is called a bi-directional Includes statement.

This Bidirectional Includes statement (over two rows in the table) can be simplified to one, using the 'Same as' control.

Entering MAT:1 'Same as' MAX means the same as the two includes statements, meaning the students must be identical in both classes.

Ensure you understand the Knowledge Base document on the Translation Table first.

When used in conjunction with the Translation Table, the Includes constraint can allow you to split a class into smaller components or sub classes and keep the same class lists across the sub-classes.  This could enable you to; break all classes of a course into tutorial classes and lectures, or lab and theory classes and/or run these classes across multiple lines.

As the students are only selecting the course, no manipulation of their preferences needs to occur to make this happen. With the Translation Table, Edval will do the translation into the required sub-components at the time of line generation.

Here are some use case scenarios for the Includes statement used in conjunction with the Translation table.

In this example, the school wants to run a combined lecture for both of the English Literature tutorial classes.  The English Literature course is broken into 2 sub-components of 3 Tutorial classes and a single Lecture class in the Courses table:

Note that the single Lecture class has a greater MaxS number and the Room for the Lecture has been set to 'Only' 1 resource. The Units entry for the overall course is 3U, which means this course will run over 1.5 lines, enabling the Lecture to be placed on a different line to the Tutorial classes.  The 'Units per line' value in the Parameters table should remain as 2U, as when translated, the tutorials and lecture will still be only 2 and 1 unit components.

Create the entry in the Translation table as follows:

To ensure that the single lecture includes all of the students from the 3 tutorial classes, 3 Includes statements are required:

Once generated, in the example below, the 3 x 2U tutorial classes are on Lines 3, 4 and 6 and the 1 x 1U lecture class on Line 1a.

The above solution would also work in this scenario, except the #C value for the sub-components would be the same.  Most schools have a line structure with a set number of periods per line; for example 6 elective lines, 8 periods per line, 2 units per line. However they may also have courses that needs to run for 12 periods (3 units), so don't fit within the standard 8 period/2U line structure.  In this situation, they have to split the class across two lines by splitting it into 2 sub-components; an 8 period (2U) component and a 4 period (1U component), which until the introduction of the Translation table would not have been easily possible without manipulating student preferences.  The addition of the Includes statements will ensure that the sub-components have identical class lists.

In both of the scenarios above without the Includes statements the Translation table entry alone would split the classes into the necessary components, but the class lists for each sub-component may not be identical. The translation table entry, when coupled with bi-directional Includes statement makes the class lists for each sub-component identical.