Sorry I missed this Dan – my apologies for not getting back to you. The input file is a CSV of student data taken from our school’s PowerSchool database. My program gets the student names and grades and sorts them into families based on the parent emails for kids from the same family. That file, together with the conference_scheduler.py is all I use. Let me know if you need more details.

They do, more frequently than should be the case. The cost of learning in the first place is usually what keeps people away. It’s always easy to justify doing it by hand when you don’t know any other way.

Luckily I enjoy these types of projects. Figuring it out is part of the fun – this is the hardest part for some people to understand.

Agreed – it’s interesting to think about this as an outreach opportunity. The students (and administrators) see it as a lot of work on my part and have said ‘just let me do it by hand, it won’t take that long’. Showing what the back end work does long term is definitely worth sharing.

I sat with a couple of students after school a few weeks ago showing them another student randomization program I threw together. I wrote a version on their computer and they took it away with them. The next day the student had converted it into a program that randomly picked a place for him and his friends to eat after school. He said they tend to sit around trying to decide – he saw a way for the computer to do this work for them. It’s really neat to see how ideas pass from one person to another – a big part of the joy of teaching!