A week that schedules itself

A timetable is only as good as the rules it refuses to break. Temari's solver holds a set of hard constraints it will never violate: a teacher cannot be in two rooms at once, a section cannot sit two subjects at once, a teacher's declared availability is absolute, daily maximums are respected, and a double period is contiguous or it does not exist.

Room needs are constraints too: a subject that requires a laboratory, gym or ICT room is booked into a free room of that type automatically, falling back to the section's own classroom only where policy allows. The chemistry lab stops being double-booked because the solver is the one keeping the lab's diary.

Within the law, the solver optimises for humane schedules: subjects spread across the week rather than stacked on one day, heavier subjects earlier where configured, and teacher gaps minimised. That is what turns a legal timetable into a week people can actually teach.

No generated timetable survives first contact with a staff room, and the workflow assumes it. The generated grid is a draft on a drag-and-drop board: move a period and every conflict it would create lights up instantly; swap two periods; pin the arrangements that politics or pedagogy demand.

Locked periods are the key tool: freeze what must not move (the double lab on Tuesday, the sports afternoon) and regenerate everything else around them. Iterate as many times as needed; each pass respects your locks and the hard constraints, so tuning converges instead of thrashing.

Versions keep the mess backstage. Draft as long as you like; publish once per term when it is right. Teachers and families only ever see the published version, and a mid-term correction is a new publish, deliberate and dated and visible as such.

The published timetable becomes a different view for every audience. A teacher sees their own week and their free periods; a section sees its subjects; the family portal shows a parent their child's day; leadership sees utilisation: which teachers are overloaded, which rooms sit empty.

The timetable drives the rest of the platform: lesson plans anchor to real periods, period-level attendance knows which class should be where, and the teacher's My Day screen is the timetable with work-state painted on it. One grid is read everywhere, instead of four wall charts that contradict each other.

Time itself is handled the Ethiopian way: bell schedules live per term, slots reference period numbers rather than clock minutes, and schools that speak the day in Ethiopian dawn-count time see the bell schedule rendered that way, with 2:00 in the morning meaning the first period, exactly as the staff room says it.