The outcome
- Schedule edits that took 30-plus minutes in PDF and Excel now happen in seconds.
- The director gained spatial intuition for crowding and transition friction.
- The tooling extended a volunteer relationship into ongoing operational AI consulting.
The challenge
The director needed to see who was where, and when, then reshuffle assignments quickly when a teacher called in or a campus hit capacity. A multi-campus preschool ran rotations between its Garden School and Farm School locations using printed PDF schedules; Excel sort-of worked, but visualizing campus floor plans alongside teacher assignments was impossible.
How we did it
- Parsed the Fall PDF schedule into structured data.
- Built a dual-dataset HTML console showing rotations across both campuses at once.
- A companion Excel workbook gives the team offline reference and printing.
- A drag-and-drop rotation editor, seeded with the parsed schedule, lets the director move assignments live.
- A floor-plan movement overlay visualizes how children physically transition between rooms through the day.