Clever School Rooming

Few consider ‘rooming’ a timetable, in other words, the allocation of rooms within a timetable, to be an exciting opportunity. Many consider it a simple administrative task, with little impact on the delivery of education to students. Things have changed. Technology has matured, and schools increasingly use it to manage resources better.

Timetables were once done manually, but now this is rare. Most high schools now use timetabling software. Not only more efficient, software (used correctly) delivers better educational solutions, and is capable of considering a huge range of possibilities for all resources at the same time.

Timetabling software has supported auto-rooming for years; however, early versions produced poor results. Users discovered it was easier to room manually, than to spend time fixing what the computer had assigned. It is important to understand that technology is now beyond just ‘helping’ the rooming process. High end software is now capable of completing the process to complete satisfaction of the human timetabler, without a single manual room change required, and to a standard most timetablers agree is better than they could have achieved themselves. Few adminstrators believe this is possible until they actually witness it themselves, and carefully check the results!