Homeschooling triplets
Allocating homeschooling tasks to triplets Kim, Ash and Lou.
Solution to the ThoughtWorks Australia Shokunin challenge for July 2020.
The challenge
In one busy Australian household both parents have been working from home during lockdown while also homeschooling their three children (triplets).
Each day the children’s teacher assigns a list of tasks for them to complete between them. Each task is assigned some points based on difficulty.
The parents are keen that each day each child completes the same number of points so as not to fall behind. And also to stop the constant bickering about who does more/less work :)
For example on Monday the teacher assigned:
Task A: 5 points
Task B: 4 points
Task C: 1 point
Task D: 2 points
Task E: 7 points
Task F: 8 points
Task G: 3 points
These tasks can be split amongst the triplets like so:
Child 1: Task D (2 points) + Task F (8 points) = 10 points
Child 2: Task A (5 points) + Task B (4 points) + Task C (1 point) = 10 points
Child 3: Task E (7 points) + Task G (3 points) = 10 points
The children cannot work on the same task. That would require the negotiation skills of a UN diplomat.
The family needs a way to quickly assess if the tasks can be divided amongst all the children so they each get the same number of points.
If the tasks fail to be split between the three children they will send them back to the teacher and ask for a new set of tasks.
How to run the solution
Prerequisite
Java 8 or later. Without installing Java you can run it in Docker from this directory with:
docker run -i -t -v `pwd`:`pwd` -w `pwd` adoptopenjdk:8-jdk-hotspot /bin/bash
Script
Run using the script go.sh, which will build the application first if necessary.
Running ./go.sh --help (or with no arguments) shows how to run the app.
Specify tasks
Specify tasks using space-separated tokens with name and points together. A simple example is (Karen’s example tasks):
./go.sh A5 B4 C1 D2 E7 F8 G3
You can get fancy with:
./go.sh Maths:6 Geography:4 Biology:5 Art:5 Music:7 Physics:3
Generate random tasks
To generate random tasks, specify the number of tasks and, optionally, the maximum number of points for each (default 10):
./go.sh --random-tasks 10 --max-points 20
./go.sh -r 8 -m 12
If you specify both explicit tasks and --random-tasks, the latter takes precedence.
Read arguments from file
You can read arguments from a file:
./go.sh @example.txt