1.5.4. aSc Timetables 2006

The aSc Timetables program was created and developed in Eastern Europe and got its start in mostly Germany , the Czech Republic and Poland . Its use it not very widespread at all, but the program has won several awards for its innovation and design. It is a relatively new piece of software having been copyrighted in 1997.

            Some of the good features of this program are the inclusion of the teacher, class, and classroom databases, which allow the easy entry of information and allow for simple changes to any personal information. The schedule is viewed in a calender format, showing a grid of the entire week and each class is colod coded to department which makes it easier to see the spread of different classes. In addition, rolling over a class will display all the important information down in a corner in the program’s window. The teacher database allows for preferences like the number of classes to be taught in one day and total consecutive classes allowed. It allows for a class to be exculded from a certain time or classroom within its settings and also has a fairly useful Wizard that will allow the user to easily create a full schedule on their first run of the program, and includes several examples ranging from very simple to very complex.

            Some of the drawbacks to this program are that the grid view system can become extremely cluttered as demonstraited in the most complicated example schedule included with the program. The color schemes can be useful, but if the number of different colors climbs too high the grid becomes messy and hard to interperet. The product is availible through online download only and the documentation can be difficult to find and requires a separate program to simply open and read. The schedule generation section does not have enough allowance for special cases and limits the creation of special circumstances. The graphics in the program are quite poor, and can at times be frightening.

            The features that this program seems to be missing are the ability to import from other schedule forms, including a plain text file. It also does not allow a range of prefrence for teachers, it is simply yes/no for teaching a particular class.

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