Honors Program

 

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

Spring 4-13-2018

Citation

Bienhoff, Tyler. Modular Scheduling System for Westside School District. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2018.

Comments

Copyright Tyler Bienhoff 2018

Abstract

Westside School district offers a modular scheduling system for their high school that is more similar to a college schedule than the typical high school system. Due to the complexity of their master schedule each semester, there are no commercially available products that can assist in creating a schedule. Hence, this thesis discusses a scheduling algorithm and management system that was built specifically for Westside High School with the potential to be expanded for use by other interested schools. The first part of the paper is focused on gathering input from students and faculty for which courses and how many sections of each class should be offered per semester. This is more complicated with a modular system since each class meeting is inputted and scheduled independently. Previously thousands of pieces of paper were used to gather information about student course interests and what courses would be offered by each department, but this has been completely transitioned to use the new system. Finally, the algorithm and courses constraints are discussed in detail, describing how restrictions imposed on class meetings to produce a valid and well-constructed solution. Many of the constraints are simple, such as making sure only one class is in a room at a time. However, other restrictions enforce that teachers have a lunch break and are not overworked as well as enforcing that that schedule solutions can quickly be found.

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