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Later, when Paul is faced with his scheduling conflict, he relaunches FourPlan and is once again faced with the initial screen. This time he selects ‘OPEN’ and is shown his old map. The first thing Paul does is select each of the courses he has taken and edit their ‘COMPLETED’ and ‘GRADE’ fields. He then proceeds to resolve his conflict. He does this by selecting the course which conflicts and changes its ‘FIX ON MAP’ field to ‘CHANGE’. This forces the constraint solver to push the course to a future semester and thus pulls a new course over to the current semester. Another option would have been for Paul to click and drag courses around manually to resolve the conflict. When Paul is happy with his map again, he selects ‘SAVE’ and exits the map.
Design 2:
Paul launches FourPlan and the following window greets him. He selects Course 6-3 as his major, inputs 2008 as his entrance year and 2012 as his expected year of graduation, and presses continue.
Paul then sees the main window of the application. On the right is his current schedule. It initially starts out empty with 4 boxes (representing classes) per semester. On the left is a list of the MIT courses. Paul can scroll through this list or search. Items can be added to the schedule by dragging the line in the list on the left to the space on the right. The figure shows the outcome of dragging “6.01” to a specified box in Semester 2.
(Figure)
The requirements tab on the left lets Paul see all of the requirements that he has not added to his schedule. Paul can also add courses from this list by dragging. Here, we see that Paul has added all of the classes he has already taken to the schedule. He has clicked the lock for each. (Since he has already completed the courses, their positions in the schedule are locked.) Paul can also use the lock to “fix” the positions of courses as he adds them to future locations in the schedule.
(Figure)
The next figure demonstrates how one can expand each requirement to see more information and specify things like which semester they want to take the class.
(Figure)
The wishlist tab lets Paul select classes that he wants to take outside of the requirements list. For example, here he could specify what HASS classes he wants to take (or a broad list he’ll choose from) and the scheduler will work to fit them in among the requirements.
(Figure)
Paul could create his schedule by hand, clicking and dragging all of the courses into slots, but he decided to use the automated tool to help him out. He does this by clicking the Auto-Generate button in the upper right corner. A window like the following appears. The current and proposed schedules are set side-by-side. The changes in the new schedule are highlighted (or in this case, starred). Paul can choose to accept changes or not. He can also accept only selected changes by using the checkboxes. By selecting “Accept” the new schedule will be displayed in the main window.
(Figure)
When Paul has advanced in his academic career and encountered a conflict, he can open the program and will see the same schedule where he left off. Paul will need to click the lock icons next to the classes he actually took to confirm their completion, or update the courses accordingly. To resolve the conflict that has occurred, Paul must first select which class he wants to keep. He can then edit the course preferences (using the button in the top right) as shown in the following figure. This will let the user specify fine level controls, such as “NOT in Fall 2011”.
(Figure)
Paul can continue to iterate on the schedule (using both the manual and automated methods) until he is satisfied with the result. (At least, until the next conflict...)