New & Stressful Adventures You Can Do

I recently had a very "nerdy" and stressful learning adventure! Our middle school had decided to host a career day and I was asked for "spreadsheet" help. Little did I know what all that would entail! This is a true testament to having a PLN, confidence in my own knowledge, and quite a leap of faith.

I don't exactly remember thinking I knew the "answer" to figuring out how to schedule the kids, but I did offer to help make it happen. Weird, right?

Here was the situation - 569 students. 31 presenters. 4 sessions each. No more than 20 students per session. The students were going to be given a Google Form to request what presentations they see. How was I going to do this? Ultimately, we settled on assigning the presenters to one of 7 career categories, and allowing students to choose 4 of them. Then the real work began.

I turned to Google Sheets. I believed this was the only way to make the schedules. I researched but wasn't coming up with anything other than a manual assignment ... ugh! THEN, I turned to my PLN. I threw the question out. And I got THE response that confirmed an idea ... throw this scenario into Gemini! It worked!

I am still very much in the camp where AI isn't the answer to everything - only some things. And this is definitely one of them! I put the following prompt into Gemini: "I need to create a career fair schedule for 600 students. We will have 30 presenters who each have 4 sessions. The presenters are labeled into 7 themes and students will be allowed to select 4 themes total. Write me a Google Apps Script to schedule the students after they complete the Google Form with their selections. There can only be 20 students in each session."

It gave me back exactly what I needed to do to the Sheet that resulted from the students making their selections and it gave me the Google Apps Script to copy & paste into the Sheet to create the schedules. It was scary and wild. I wouldn't know if it worked until we had all the students fill out the Form. The afternoon we felt confident we had the vast majority of our students, I hit the "run script" button. And waited. And waited. It took roughly 10 minutes - and voliá! Two new tabs appeared - one with 4 sessions assigned to each student and one with the students who would be in each of the 4 sessions for the presenters. Holy cow! Mind blown!!!!

From there, I took a deep breath! It worked! And, because we actually had more spots that we did students, every student received their 4 choices. Now I just needed to make a schedule each student could read and a roster for each of the 4 sessions for our presenters. (Thanks, Google Docs + Auto-crat!)

Then came the next twist ... one presenter had to cancel and 3 more volunteered to come! Whaaaaat? We also found about 7 students that hadn't filled out the form, so we got them to do it ASAP and I had no other choice but to re-run the script. Yikes! I should have had more faith in the process, but I was incredibly nervous it wouldn't work. But it did! I just pushed the run script button and it overwrote the initial schedules and rosters. 

I am still amazed that it worked so nicely! This is the kind of problem I believe AI is built to help solve. 

Do you have a daunting challenge ahead of you? I strongly recommend trying out Gemini. I do believe the prompt is key ... knowing the parameters of the output your are looking for as well as asking for a Google Apps Script. And don't be afraid to adjust the prompt. Still need a little reassurance? Reach out! I'd be happy to help.

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