Companion product
The Magnetic Board
Before scheduling software there was a board on the wall with magnets on it, and a timetabler who moved them by hand. That interface was good, and we rebuilt it.
Why keep a manual interface at all
Automatic generation solves the hard combinatorial part. It does not always settle the last dozen placements, where the deciding factor is something nobody wrote into a constraint: a colleague's childcare, a room that floods in winter, a department head's preference that exists but is not written down.
For that last stretch, a human with good spatial judgement beats a specification every time — provided the interface gets out of the way.
How it behaves
- Rows are lecturers; columns are the days of the week, subdivided into usable hours
- Plus and minus controls add or remove usable hours from a day, and minus disables itself rather than deleting an occupied slot
- Hold a room over the plus control for a moment and additional hours appear to the right, so the column does not have to be widened by hand first
- Drop into one of those newly revealed hours and the columns expand automatically to accommodate it
- Move a room into a column that already contains the same room and both turn red immediately
- Pick up or single-click a room and every field containing that room changes colour, so its whole footprint is visible at once
A note on what this is
The Magnetic Board is a placement interface, not a scheduling engine. It does not generate anything and it does not replace constraint checking — it is a better pair of hands for the part of the job that stays manual. Ask us if you would like to see it working.
See Wise Timetable on your own data
Book a 45-minute online presentation. We will walk through your institution's scheduling problem, show how Wise Timetable handles it, and answer anything your team wants to test.