What it does
Smootables models the school year as structure, not as a spreadsheet convention. A campus carries academic years; each year carries as many periods as you need, and each period declares its week model: recurring ("The same timetable repeats every week.") or custom ("Week by week; the timetable can differ each week."). School Day Profiles ("e.g. Standard Day, Short Friday") define per-weekday start and end times, lesson and break lengths, and lunch periods, and the slot grid is generated from them; a period uses the year default or its own profile.
Resources live in the same plan. Teachers carry weekly and yearly hour limits, per-course teaching eligibility, and unavailability rules; rooms carry capacity and allowed-room lists; equipment is an inventory with quantities and compatible rooms. Because the solver reads this plan directly, the planning work is the timetabling work: what you model here is what timetable generation enforces.
How it works in Smootables
- Model the year once: periods with their Timetable structure, School Day Profiles that generate the slot grid and lunch periods, and Holiday weeks that block scheduling inside a period ("Extra weeks off (e.g. autumn break) that block scheduling within teaching periods.").
- Start the next year from the last one: Copy structure from another year brings over day profiles, teaching periods, and holidays, with dates scaled to the new year. Timetables and plans are deliberately not copied. Finished years archive to read-only and can be unarchived.
- Fill the plan where it suits you: the Period planning grid with click-to-edit cells for study unit, groups, teacher, room, lessons per week, and duration, or the Timeline view with drag-editable bars across years. Bulk edit placements changes teachers, groups, room, duration, or week structure for many placements at once.
- Shape each placement: restrict it to specific weeks ("Set to 0 to skip a week"), allow certain weekdays, prefer Morning or Afternoon, or require All lessons on the same day.
- Watch the load as you decide: the Teacher Workload panel shows weekly and yearly hours against each teacher's limits ("Over limit", "All within limits"), including load from other campuses, while the period header totals hours, estimated teaching cost, and completeness (Empty, Partial, Complete). When the plan changes after a solve, the Generate button says so: "Plan changed since last generation".
Key capabilities
Recurring and custom weeks
A period either repeats one master week or defines every week separately. Placements can restrict themselves to specific weeks, so short courses and alternating patterns are plan data, not workarounds.
School day profiles
Per-weekday schedules, lesson and break lengths, and lunch periods generate the slot grid. A year holds several profiles, and any period can override the year default.
Year copy and archive
Copy day profiles, periods, and holidays from an earlier year with dates scaled to the new one. Archived years turn read-only with all their data preserved.
Teachers with limits and eligibility
Weekly and yearly hour limits feed validation and workload views. Teaching eligibility defines which teachers can be selected automatically for each course while planning, and unavailability rules block days or repeating in-day windows.
Rooms, equipment, and allow-lists
Room capacity checks against real participant counts. Placements take any room, one room, or an allowed list. Equipment is an inventory with quantities and compatible rooms, carried through plan and timetable.
Workload while you plan
Weekly and yearly teacher load with over-limit flags, per-period allocation tables, cross-campus totals, period hour sums, and estimated teaching cost, updated as you edit.
Where it fits
Everything downstream reads this plan. Timetable generation validates it and turns it into a timetable, individual learning paths explains how groups and single students live inside placements, and import and export is the fastest way to fill a plan from the spreadsheets you already have. For the thinking behind the structure, the academic-year planning guides cover terms, holidays, and course catalogs, and the teacher workload guides cover hours and fairness.