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Making a Timetable Tutorial

This is a tutorial to make you familiar with the features and capabilities of SM-Timetable that are used to make timetables. Before beginning it is assumed that you have installed SM-Timetable and completed the previous tutorial.

There are three ways that you can make timetable. You can make all connections by hand, or you can use the commands in the Allocate menu to get SM-Timetable to assist you in making decisions about what goes where. Or you can use a combination of the two previous methods: using manual and automatic methods together.

SM-Timetable can work with any requirements and any classes you set up yourself and can then fill in the gaps to complete the timetable. At any point you can accept the suggestions made by SM-Timetable, or you can do you set your own connections.

Depending on the size and complexity of your school offerings, you should expect to still have to do some work in thinking through the possibilities for combining classes, as there is no sign yet of computers being able to match the creativity of a person.


Getting the sample timetable

To work through this tutorial you need a copy of the sample timetable. As you may already have data in SM-Timetable that you want to keep, the copy of the sample timetable will be made in a new database.

You should already know how to start SM-Timetable, but here is a quick summary.
  1. Start SM-Timetable from the shortcut in the Start|Programs|SMPCS Apps list.
  2. On the password line, type the password of sunshine and press Enter.
In step one, it is important to start SM-Timetable from the shortcut installed in the Start menu. This is because if SM-Timetable is started directly from the executable in the SMTTABLE folder, you will not have administrator access to the program and will not have the Allocate commands to use.

So you can keep your current data while doing this tutorial now you can make another database. Do this by choosing the New|Database command. On the Details page then backspace over the name and type Tutorial 2 and press Enter. You have now created a new database and you can now switch to it.

In the School view double click on the Tutorial 2 item in the Database folder. Wait for the database to open. A message will appear about a day item that must have Today set to Yes. This can just be ignored for now. As a new database it will be empty with most folders not showing a + sign next to them. Any folder that does have a plus sign has some items in it.

Now you can copy the sample timetable into the database.
  1. Open the Utilities folder.
  2. Open the Advanced folder.
  3. Click and drag the Sample data item onto the Tutorial 2 item.
These are the same steps as done in the introductory tutorial.


Deleting the existing classes

If you select a student in the Student folder of the School view and then select the Timetable page you can see the timetable for the student. If you open the same student in the School view, the classes are visible there and opening the Chosen courses folder shows the courses the student wanted to do.

To allow you to see the steps of creating a timetable you will delete the classes for a single year and then use the Allocate commands to work out the classes for the year from scratch. For this tutorial the Year 11 classes will be cleared. Do these steps now.
  1. Choose the View|Year 11 command.
  2. Open the Class folder.
  3. Select a class.
  4. Right click on the class and choose Select All.
  5. Right click on the class and choose Delete Selected Classes.
Wait for the classes to be deleted. Now open up some of the student items and see there are no classes connected to them. In the Chosen courses folder the list of courses that each student has chosen is still present.


Courses offered

In this tutorial the following is the situation. The students going into year 11 next year have been given a list of possible courses to choose from. At this stage, it is unknown what the final mix of courses will be, it will depend on the number of students that choose each course and whether there is enough interest or whether there are teacher available for the classes.

All the students have courses already set in the Chosen courses folder, but you can change the courses if you want to.

Deleting a chosen course
  1. Open a student item.
  2. Open the Chosen course folder.
  3. Select a course.
  4. Right click on the course and choose the Remove command.

Adding a course
  1. Select the Scratchpad page.
  2. In the School view click on the Course folder and hold down the mouse button.
  3. Drag the folder to the Scratchpad page.
  4. In the School view scroll to the student you want to add a course to.
  5. Click and drag a course from the Scratchpad page onto a student.
Steps 2 and 3 together make a click and drag action and are usually summarised as a single action as in step 5.

In step 5, you can add more than one course to a student by doing this alternative sequence after step 4.
  1. Hold down the Ctrl key and click on a course in the Scratchpad.
  2. Repeat step 5 for each course you wanted selected.
  3. Hold down the Ctrl key and click and drag one of the selected courses from the Scratchpad page onto a student.
All of the selected courses are added to the student's Chosen courses folder.


Changing the course priority

The order of the courses in the Chosen courses folder is significant. For each student the courses at the top of the list are allocated first. You can change the order by doing this.
  1. Open a student item.
  2. Open the Chosen course folder.
  3. Click and drag a course up or down the list.
Take some time to try these actions now.

SM-Timetable helps you to organise the offered courses by arranging the courses onto lines. Where in this case, a line represents a number of periods that are enough for the minutes required for the course. A typical course may cover an entire line, while an extension course requires half a line.

Once the lines have been decided students who cannot do all their choices will need to choose a different course to do from the ones available on the lines.


Suggest Class structure

Still assuming you are viewing year 11 students only, choose the Suggest|Class structure command. After a few seconds the Information page will show the results of the command. The first page shows the suggested lines for the year 11 courses. This list may take more than one page.

Click on the Next page button of the Information page toolbar. This is the button with the right pointing triangle. The next page shows the success of the class structure. By success this means the number of students that can be placed into a class of their choice based on the lines that are suggested.

Click on the Next page button again to get to the list of students without classes. This shows the name of each student and any course they cannot be in a class for. Keeping clicking on next until you get to the Things to check page. This shows possible options or information in SM-Timetable that may be unexpectedly affecting the making of the class structure.

Using the Suggest|Class structure command does not affect the information in SM-Timetable. Instead it is an indication of what the corresponding Allocate|Class structure command does. The idea here is to repeatedly use the Suggest|Class structure command while fine-tuning the details in SM-Timetable to get as close as possible to a successful result.

Full details of the way to control SM-Timetable is detailed in the Directing SM-Timetable section of the Help, but here the Course item and the Details page is most important. Open the Course folder and double click on a course to show the Details page. Look at the fields and most of them have a direct affect on how SM-Timetable can organise the lines. At this stage:
 are all significant. You may like to try altering these values for some courses and trying the Suggest|Class structure command again. Experimenting with these values and checking the Structure success Information page is a useful exercise.


Allocate Class structure

It can be assumed that SM-Timetable will not reach of score of 100% of students can do all chosen courses. The program is not usually able to do reach that point as it is not "clever" enough. At some point you can stop and use the suggested line as a guide to what courses can be offered and then ask the students without classes to make a choice from the lines that have been decided on.

On the Information toolbar turn on the Show detailed view of item button and then use the Suggest|Class structure command one more time. Now if you move to the pages with the Students without classes information you can see each student has a list of the courses he or she cannot do and possible alternatives. Printing these pages with so you have a record of the courses students can't do and the possible alternatives. You may not want to do this now to save some paper.

After doing this, the Allocate|Class Structure command is used to make the classes for you. Click on the Allocate menu now. You can see that the commands are not available. This is to prevent them from being used unintentionally. To make them active, choose the Tools|Advanced|Enable Allocate menu command, do that now.

Now choose the Allocate|Class Structure command. This will show exactly the same information as the suggest command but it will take a longer as the classes are made. When it is finished open the Class folder and open a class and see how it has been put on a line, but no teachers or students have been added yet.


Suggest Class lists

The Suggest|Class lists command is the next step and it shows for each class the students that SM-Timetable would put into each class. Try the Suggest|Class lists command and the first page for the Class lists for Year 11 could be printed by clicking on the Print current page button on the Information page toolbar. If this was not a tutorial you may print all pages to give to faculty coordinator for checking what the students want to do.

Assuming all is in order, choose the Allocate|Class lists command now. Of course, in practice, there may need to be more work before reaching this step. Opening a class item and the students can be seen in the class.


Periods

Now you have classes with students in them and each class is connected with a line, but the classes are still not on actual periods. Open the Class periods folder of a class item and it is empty. In fact, the folder doesn't have the + sign next to it as it is empty and cannot be opened.

If you have previously just done the Allocate|Class lists clicking on a Class periods folder does not change the Information page. This is because it is often convenient to be able to select different items in the School view to examine the details while still keeping the result of the Suggest or Allocate command available. To allow this on the Information page toolbar there is the button that looks like a lock. When it is on, SM-Timetable keeps the Information page from changing.

Click on the Keep information from changing so that it pops up. If a Class periods folder is now selected in the School view you can see a list of the classes and columns for the periods they are on. Which right now is empty.

Choose the Suggest|Period structure command. This shows how the lines are to be allocated to actual periods on each day. This is affected by the Double periods required field of each course, and whether the Days field for any possible teachers of a class is limited in the days available. Other than this, the periods will be spread out to distribute the lines relatively evenly over the days available.

The making of the periods is detailed in the Making a timetable manually section of the Creating a timetable help. In this tutorial you do not have to make the periods as they are already made for you.

Choose the Allocate|Period structure command now. As with all the commands in the Allocate menu it will give the same results as the corresponding Suggest command and also stores the results in SM-Timetable. Now turn off the lock button on the Information page toolbar and select a Class periods folder in the School view.

As there are 6 columns for showing the periods in the Class Period List, you may be wondering what happens if there is more than six periods for a class. In that case turning on the Set printer to landscape orientation button on the Information page toolbar will show additional columns.


Teachers and Rooms

The last steps in using SM-Timetable are to connect teachers and rooms to the classes on the periods. Usually the teachers will normally be connected earlier in the process to each of the classes as this is a decisions made by executive staff of the school. This is one area where SM-Timetable is not usually used to automatically allocate teachers to classes as there are factors that are beyond the scope of an automatic solution, but SM-Timetable can still assist.

Open the Teacher folder and open a teacher in the school view. In the Preferred courses and Preferred rooms folders you can set the courses and rooms for each teacher. This is done in the usual way of putting the Course and Room folder onto the Scratchpad and then using a click and drag to put the items in each folder of the teacher.

This information is then used by all the commands in the Suggest and Allocate menus. Even the commands used at the beginning of the process such as Class Structure will take these preferences into account when arranging the courses onto lines.

The other way direct way set the teachers and rooms is after the Allocate|Class Structure to directly set the room and teacher for each class item. Again as this is done as a decision making process outside of the control of SM-Timetable it is done by using a click and drag from the Scratchpad onto each class item in
the school view.

Try it now.
  1. Select the Scratchpad page.
  2. Choose the Folders|Class all folders command.
  3. Click and drag the Teacher folder to the Scratchpad.
  4. Click and drag the Room folder to the Scratchpad.
  5. Open the Class folder.
  6. Click and drag a teacher onto a class item.
  7. Click and drag a room onto a class item.
Note that the class item  itself does not need to be open so you can see the connected items when you do the click and drag, but being able to see the teacher or room attached to the class can be useful feedback.

After trying this a few times, choose the Suggest|Teachers for classes command. On the Information pages there is the Teachers for classes page and the Teacher success pages. On the first page of information the Uncovered column indicates the number of periods of each class where a teacher could not be connected to the period. Either because the SM-Timetable could not determine a teacher for the class, or the teacher of the class is already connected to another class in the same period.

Now choose the Allocate|Teachers for classes command. When it is finished select the Class folder in the School view and turn off the Lock button on the information page and turn on the Show detailed view button. The gives a detailed list of the classes. You can sort the list by clicking on the heading of a column. Click on the Number of Periods heading. By sorting the classes on this column it is easy to spot any class that doesn't have the right number.

Experiment by clicking on different headings to see how the list changes. If you have not previously tried it you can also change the size of the text on the page by clicking on either of the two buttons with the F and the down and up arrows. Click on these to make the text smaller or larger. If some important text doesn't fit in a column you can make the font smaller.

The last step of the making of the timetable is to use the Rooms for classes command. As the steps are very similar to the Teachers for classes command doing this is left as an exercise for you to try.


Finished

Once the timetable is finished it can be viewed and printed from the Timetable page for any item selected in the School view. Details on doing this are in the first tutorial.


Using the help

In the Utilities folder there is the Help folder. This folder contains the help system for SM-Timetable. By opening a folder and clicking on an item you can read the help description on the Information page. As with anything shown on the Information page you print it if you want to have a copy on paper.

The "How do I" and "Why" sections has the answers to commonly asked questions about SM-Timetable and is a recommended first stop if you have a question about making a timetable that you cannot figure out from the other topics.

Spend a few minutes now looking through the Help information.


The end

You now know enough to use SM-Timetable to make a timetable. You can:
 Although this tutorial emphasised how to use the automatic timetable commands of SM-Timetable, you can:
 Doing this still allows the use of the Suggest and Allocate commands to fill in the remaining parts of the timetable. For more details on doing this and making timetables please refer to the Creating a timetable and Directing SM-Timetable sections of the help.

Reading all the Help topics is highly recommended at this stage, for the specifics of creating a timetable and using advanced features such as organising timetables for casual teachers.With SM-Timetable I hope you have as much satisfaction using it, as we did while designing it.


Copyright 2007, SMPCS