Scheduling Program, confused

[luboldja]

I'm writing a scheduling program for our school since it my senior year and they need one terribly. I have only taken two years of HL IB Computer Science so i'm no programming genius. I haven't even started programming yet, i'm just trying to get my algorith right, and i'm not quite sure where to start.

It needs to be able to places classes in a 7x7 square w/out any student conflicts. As a basic beginning, i planned no using a multi-dimensional array as the basic skeleton of the schedule, and a seperate array list that represents the cources in the first dimension and the students/teacher's names in the second. Once a class is placed in a square in the first array, the names of teachers/students in the class placed in the array list in order to then compare the students names in the second dimension of the array to those in the arraylist to see if they are already on the schedule. This is probably incredibly confusing, but if anyone has any ideas on where to start it would be much appretiated. Thanks.

[luboldja]

bump, any one have any ideas? i'm still stumped.

[DistantJob]

I think you should make a use case diagram first, to see what are the use cases of your project. When you understand what are the use cases, you can choose a technology, like Java, for example. When you have chosen the technology, you can choose the data structures to use, but, seemingly, you have a problem choosing the best data structures for your project. The problem is, that this description is not clear at all and probably the tasks are not clear to you either. The point is, that there are a lot of solutions from data structures point of view, but, before choosing the data structure which is best to you, you should have a specification, which describes exactly what you need, your post doesn't describe understandably your task. If you post a clearer description about your problem, I would happily help you.