Date of Award

Spring 2020

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

Computer Science

Degree Name

Master of Science

First Advisor

Wheeler Ruml

Second Advisor

Marek Petrik

Third Advisor

Christopher Bauer

Abstract

The University of New Hampshire Chemistry Department has been organizing study groups for students called Peer Led Team Learning (PLTL) for years now. However, assigning hundreds of students into groups manually is a non-trivial task, and doesn't guarantee the best possible solution. Each student will have certain times that they can meet, and more specifically, certain times that they prefer to meet. Additionally, when assigning students to groups, the students' traits should be taken in to account (e.g. preventing having only one freshman in the group). In this thesis, we devise a mathematical formulation of this problem, and apply an integer linear program solver to it to optimize the results. This work was developed with frequent input and feedback from the users to ensure that it met their needs and built on their suggestions. We demonstrate that our method is sufficiently fast to be used for the current needs of the users, and can continue providing high quality results as the future needs of the department scales.

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