Key takeaways
- Count stations before counting hours; capacity is stations, not floor space.
- When students outnumber stations, rotations share the hands-on time fairly.
- Practical blocks need minimum consecutive hours to be worth running.
- Shared spaces need cleanup and transition time between shifts, in the timetable.
The space facts to record
One record per specialist space, before any placement.
- Station count by type: bays, lifts, benches, machines
- Which qualifications and units the space serves
- Minimum consecutive hours a session needs there
- Shifts the space runs, and the transition time between them
- Cohorts sharing the space this year
- Equipment that moves between spaces, and who moves it
Building the rotation
The aim is equal hands-on time per student, provable from the grid.
- Compare cohort size to station count per space; the ratio sets the number of rotation groups.
- Split the cohort into that many groups.
- Assign groups to stations on a weekly or bi-weekly cycle.
- Check no two groups hit the same station type at once.
- Schedule each group's block at the space's minimum consecutive hours or more.
- Verify over the full cycle that every student passes through every required station.
How to do this in Smootables: rooms, equipment, and allowed rooms
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Period
Room A
Conflicts detected
The following conflicts will occur if you proceed:
Room Lab B is already bookedChemistry practical at 13:00–14:30
Workshops, labs, and their equipment are resource types in Resources, and the binding between a subject and its space is enforced per study unit: the allowed rooms in Study Unit Settings are hard rules for the solver, so a unit tied to the welding shop is never placed elsewhere. Room unavailability rules (full-day blocks and repeating in-day windows) keep maintenance slots and shift-transition windows out of scheduling.
When a solve fails on space, the report names the cause in typed terms (a room pool too small, a room not allowed, room capacity too small) with suggested actions such as adding rooms or changing allowed rooms, which turns a vague "the workshop is full" into a specific scarcity statement.
Protecting the block
A practical block earns its length. Setup and safety briefing at the front, teardown at the back, and the actual learning in between: shorten the block and the overheads stay while the learning shrinks. Blocks at or above the space's minimum consecutive hours, protected from fragmentation, are what make the rotation worth building.
How those blocks alternate with classroom weeks is the next design decision, covered in mixed theory and practice weeks. The recipe-level treatments are workshop room capacity and lab block scheduling.
Questions planners ask about workshop scheduling
How long should a rotation cycle run?
The sourced practice rotates stations within a shop on a weekly or bi-weekly cycle, so no two groups use the same station at once and everyone passes through each station type. Shorter cycles add churn; longer ones delay coverage.
Why not split a practical across short sessions like a theory subject?
Because setup, safety briefing, and teardown consume a fixed slice of every session. Practical work needs minimum consecutive hours for meaningful practice; three scattered singles can deliver less hands-on time than one protected block of the same total length.
Whose problem is the transition time between shifts?
The timetable's. If the schedule shows back-to-back shifts on a shared shop, the cleanup happens inside someone's teaching time. Put the transition window in the grid, where it is visible and owned.