Bus buddy preferences problem

[brettm]

I am a school teacher and we have kids going on a school trip to the snow.

Each child has picked 3 preferences for their "bus buddy".

I am after a way to put this data into excel and run a query against it to tell me which matches work best based on the kids' preferences.

Example below (each child is represented by a letter):
[TABLE="width: 500"]
<tbody>[TR]
[TD="align: center"]Student[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Pref#1[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Pref#2[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]Pref#3[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: center"]A[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]C[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]D[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]A[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: center"]B[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]G[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]E[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]A[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: center"]C[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]E[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]A[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]F[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: center"]D[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]G[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]B[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]A[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="align: center"]E[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]A[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]B[/TD]
[TD="align: center"]C[/TD]
[/TR]
</tbody>[/TABLE]

and so on for all 100 children that we have going.

I realise this is similar to the Stable Roommates Problem - except that we have not asked kids to rank every child going on the excursion! I have struggled to find the code for this algorithm and be able to run it.

Any thoughts/spreadsheet examples/code etc would be greatly appreciated!

Brett

 

[igold]

Brett,

The issue that you bring up here is very interesting. Seeing how these are "children", in my opinion- which is totally uninformed about any facet of teaching or rearing children, it would seem to me that the most healthy thing to do would be to figure out who the "most popular" students are by the criteria of having the most Pref#1 choices down to the least popular students using the same criteria. Then take the students in the least preferential group and sitting them with the most preferred students. Perhaps new friendships will be forged or new "life skills" can be learned by the latter group.

Just my two cents and food for thought.

Good luck to you and the children...

igold