Multi-class, interlinked school timetable as a MySQL database - php

Question

I've looked around for a bit now at other suggestions relating to this, but nothing I've seen has quite suited my needs, so here goes!
What I have is a multi-class (Australian secondary school; Years 7-12), multi-day (Mon-Fri) school timetable. What I now want to build is a MySQL database with the following information to be deployed on an account driven website.
Subjects:
Running time (as "Period 1 on Wednesday", "Period 2 on Friday", etc. -- multiple values in this column) Instructor (linked to separate database of all teachers) -- This would additionally need to change (temporarily) if a teacher was sick and replaced; perhaps a "replacementinstructor" column to be ignorned when NULL. Location (different, but specifically allocated, rooms on different days) -- As above, change temporarily when room altered.Other obviousnesses: Course name ("Year 7 Health"), Unique ID (Something like "7.HEALTH", rather than just auto-incrementing INT.), etc.
Teachers:
First name, last name Courses they take Contact infoOther obviousnesses: Unique ID (Auto-incrementing INT), Username (fname.lname), Password for their account, etc.
Students:
First name, last name Courses they attend (stored as an individual list for each student) Year level / Form (Year 7, Year 11, etc.)Basic personal info (Home suburb, email, etc.)More obviousnesses: Unique ID (same setup as teachers), Username (same as teachers), password, etc.
Any insight as to how I might design such a data structure would be greatly appreciated, I'm more of a UI fanatic than a MySQL thinker ;-D
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I can think of the following tables to use in MySQL:
students
Student information
id (auto_increment)
firstname
lastname
username
password
student_id (I had a student ID but I can't remember if I was given this in yr 7 or yr 10)
year
email
contact_phone
street
suburb
state (ENUM - ACT,NSW,WA,SA,TAS,VIC,NT,QLD)
teachers
Teacher information
id (auto_increment)
firstname
lastname
title (Dr, Mrs, etc)
username
password
email
contact_phone
street
suburb
state (ENUM - ACT,NSW,WA,SA,TAS,VIC,NT,QLD)
subjects
All the different subjects
id (auto_increment)
subject
subject_code (eg 7.HEALTH)
year
locations
Various locations around the school
id (auto_increment)
location (eg BLOCK A, ROOM 2, MUSIC ROOM)
subject_teachers
What subjects each teacher teaches
id (auto_increment)
subject_id
teacher_id
subject_students
Which subjects each student takes
id (auto_increment)
subject_id
student_id
subject_timetable
Main Timetable
id (auto_increment)
subject_id
location_id
teacher_id
alt_teacher_id (eg substitute teacher)
duration
period (number 1-however many periods in a day. 6 if I remember correctly)
week (number 1-2 or even perhaps 1-52)
weekday (number 1-5)
notes (as #Oswald suggested you could add additional notes for when things change)
The notes could be collated and then displayed as footnotes on the timetable.

Answer 2

You will obviously need a table for Subjects, a table for Students and a table for Teachers.
Read up on database normalization. This will tell you (amongst other things):
Do not put the running time into the Subject table as a comma separated list. Instead use a table for the running time and use a foreign key to map entries from that table to Subjects table.
Same goes for mapping teacher to courses.
Same goes for mapping students to courses.
That Running Time table would also be suitable for holding the location of a course during a specific running time.
Additionally, if you record temporary changes in the database, you are dependent on people changing the relevant information at a specific time. To get around this, you might want to consider a table Lessons, where you record
Running time
Week number
Course
Instructor
Location
Other fields that might be specific to that particular lesson.
This will allow you to schedule changes in advance (Mr. McCachney is sick for the next two weeks, Room 101 is closed for redecoration for a month, etc.)