Summary

What is Magic Schedules?

Building a school's master schedule usually costs weeks of stressful puzzle-work: hundreds of interlocking constraints, where one late change can undo all of it. Magic Schedules gets you to a finished, conflict-free schedule in a fraction of that time, without taking a single decision out of your hands.

The app is a collaboration between you and the computer, each doing what it does best. You make the decisions: place a class in the exact slot you want, keep a certain teacher on a certain course. The app treats every one as untouchable.

The computer does what no person can: it explores thousands of possibilities in seconds, fills in everything you haven't decided, and rechecks every rule whenever something changes. Don't like part of the result? Change it, keep what you liked, and solve again. You can work anywhere between fully manual and fully automatic, and move between the two at any time.

And it does all of this on a real model of your school: teacher meetings, study plan requirements, teacher workloads, electives. Not a simplified grid.

Projects

A project is the container where everything else lives, including the schedule you build. You'll usually work in one, but you can clone a project at any time: to start next year's schedule from this year's, or to experiment in a copy and compare results before committing.

The rest of the tabs are the path to a finished schedule. Work through them from left to right: each page defines information the later ones depend on, and some can't be completed until the earlier ones are.

Classrooms: your school's levels / grades / classrooms

Fill this in so the app can assign classes to each classroom; every classroom ends up with its own schedule. Grades are where academic definitions attach: the study plan is defined per grade, and so is a teacher's qualification to teach a course. Levels have no scheduling meaning; they're just organization, letting you view one level's grades and classrooms at a time.

Templates: how the classes / recesses are distributed

A template is not a concept schools normally use; it exists because the software needs to know exactly when classes occur. It lays out the class sessions and recesses of a day, with their times and durations. A school may have one or more, and in the Study Plan you choose a template for each grade. From that, the software knows how many sessions each grade has and at which times, which is what lets it guarantee, for example, that a teacher is never assigned to two overlapping sessions.

Multi-Week Rotation: how your weeks repeat

There are two ways to build a master schedule. Single Week: one week of schedules that repeats all year. Multi-Week: several weeks, each with its own arrangement, repeating as a cycle: week 1, week 2, then back to week 1. Multi-Week is available only on certain plans. Read the case that matches your school.

One concept applies to both: classes are never tied to a weekday. They belong to a block, a day's worth of classes, and this page is where blocks are placed on the days of the week.

If you want a Single Week schedule

There's nothing you must do here: every project starts with blocks A to E placed Monday to Friday. The page becomes useful when you need to rearrange: move a block to another day and that entire day of classes moves with it. You can swap two days without redoing a single class.

If you want a Multi-Week schedule

Add more weeks and arrange the blocks differently in each. A block repeated across weeks creates the rotation; one placed only in some weeks makes those weeks unique. The software builds and checks the schedule across the entire cycle, so every rule holds in every week.

Study Plan: which courses need to be taught for each grade, and how many sessions

Here you define what the schedule must contain, in two steps. First, choose a template for each grade; that sets how many class sessions the grade has to fill. Then add your courses and enter how many sessions each course takes per grade, until all sessions are used. For example: a grade with 10 sessions could take 5 of Mathematics and 5 of Science. With the study plan complete, the software knows exactly which classes every classroom needs, and it will make sure each one ends up on the schedule.

Teachers: who can teach each course, and how much they can work

Here you add your teaching staff and record two things per teacher. First, qualifications: which of the study plan's courses they can teach, chosen grade by grade. Second, maximum teaching load: the most class sessions they may be given. The software obeys both when assigning classes: a course only goes to a qualified teacher, and no one is loaded beyond their limit.

Electives / Meetings: activities shared by several teachers or grades

A normal class belongs to one classroom and one teacher. This page handles the exceptions: activities where several teachers, and possibly several grades, must all be free at the same time. An elective, like Art or Music, is shared by students from different grades and appears on the classroom schedules like a class. A meeting is staff-only, like a coordination meeting: it marks the chosen teachers as busy and never appears on a classroom schedule. In both cases you decide exactly when the activity runs: pick the days and times, then add the teachers and, for electives, the grades. The software builds the rest of the schedule around these fixed points, never booking a participant elsewhere at those times.

Solver: where the schedule is built

Everything before this page was preparation. Each classroom has a schedule grid, and the goal is to fill every grid to 100%: its study plan fulfilled, every course placed with its required sessions. You can work by hand: pick a teacher for a course and drag its sessions into the slots you want. Even then the rules hold: the app only offers teachers qualified for that course and grade, and refuses any slot where the teacher is busy with another class or a meeting.

You can also do it automatically. Click Solve and the Wizard fills everything still open, exploring thousands upon thousands of possible schedules for one that respects every rule you defined. It doesn't settle for the first that works: it prefers solutions where a course doesn't repeat within a day and its sessions spread evenly across the week. How many Wizard runs you get per day depends on your plan; working by hand is always available.

Mixing the two is how the app is meant to be used. Any assignment can be locked; a locked assignment is your decision, and the Wizard will never move it. A typical session: place and lock what you care about, let the Wizard fill the rest, change what you don't like, lock what you do, and solve again. Nothing locked is ever touched, and each run gets you closer.

Some plans include the AI Assistant: a chat that knows your project and schedules. It answers any question you could answer yourself by reading through the schedules, without the digging, and makes changes when you ask. Because you ask in plain words, it isn't limited to what the app has a button for. Real examples:

• “Mr. García can't work on Tuesdays. Make me a list of all the teachers who would be available to replace him.”
• “Let's make a list of the classes that need a computer lab. Suggest candidates and I'll confirm each one.” And once the list is agreed: “I only have two labs. Help me move assignments so that no more than two of these classes run at the same time.”

Reports: the finished schedules, ready to print and share

This is the finish line, where the solved schedule becomes the documents your school will actually use. The first two reports are the schedules themselves: one per classroom and one per teacher. Classroom schedules come with a designer: choose which classrooms to include and adjust the pages until they match your school's style. Teacher schedules are ready as they are.

The third, Teachers Workload, is a different kind of tool: it measures the quality of your solution. For every teacher it shows how many sessions they could work, how many the schedule gives them, and the resulting load percentage: at a glance, who is over- or under-loaded. This is where scheduling meets your budget. Teacher hours are among a school's largest costs, and a schedule can be complete and conflict-free while still wasting paid hours. This report makes those hours visible, and every hour recovered by adjusting and re-solving is money back: one of the ways this app is an investment, not just a convenience.

The warning triangles

The app constantly checks that your project is consistent, so problems surface the moment they appear instead of when you try to solve. When a page has something that needs attention, a warning triangle appears next to its name in the navigation bar; hover it to see each problem.

• Amber warnings are reminders: something is incomplete, like a teacher without qualifications. You can keep working, but some of them disable solving until resolved.
• Red critical warnings mean the schedule cannot be built at all. A critical warning also locks every page to its right in the navigation bar until you fix it on the page that raised it.

Each page's chapter in this guide ends with a Warnings you may see here section listing the warnings that page can raise and how to fix each one.