Room Pools
Search in our help centre and you will find lots of guides explaining the rooming process – here is a quick summary of what is involved with room pools.
What is a room pool? A room pool is a timetabling tool which helps you group together and manage your specialist rooms so that you can ensure that Home Ec. happens in the kitchen and Chemistry in the lab.
How do I create a room pool? You do this in Settings > Enums > Room Pools. Here are the exact steps. Make sure to only enter rooms into room pools that are absolutely required for subjects. – Why? Because if you add a room to the room pool, it will no longer be considered a ‘general classroom’ by the solver, and therefore will not be included in the Auto Assign rooms feature.
The room pool is created. What do I do next? Now it’s time to go into timetable construction (Screen 5 Class Data) and manually add the room pool to any teaching group that requires this type of room. In reality, this means for example, going into every year in class data, finding every individual teaching group of Chemistry that you know will need a lab, and selecting your ‘Labs’ room pool under the ‘Room’ dropdown when you edit the teaching group.
Note – If you have a teaching group of Chemistry, and only the double requires the Lab, you can go into the ‘Edit Individual Room’ button and apply the pool only to the double. When you get to the point of automatically assigning your classrooms for the rest of the timetable, you will know that these specialist subjects will only be assigned a room from within the pool you have selected.
You can also manually assign individual rooms before auto assigning rooms, not just pools. However in the case of Chemistry for example, it will make it easier for the solver to complete the timetable if it can choose between a number of labs rather than being confined to one.
Is that it? Yes, that’s it! Here are lots of other guides related to timetabling your rooms which are linked below, but if you simply want to make sure your specialist subjects are guaranteed their specialist rooms, this is the way to do it.
- Room Pools – What are they used for?
- Creating Room Pools
- Add / Remove / Edit Rooms
- Filtered Scheduling
- The Order in Rooming
- Rooming a Timetable
- Preferred & Specialist Rooms
