The Reading Seed Matcher software is designed to take 3 inputs: student referrals, coach registration, and existing assignments. All input files are comma-separated value (CSV) format text files. The matching algorithm is run on each school separately. After each run of the algorithm, a new assignments CSV file is created in the output directory.
To run the Reading Seed Matcher, double-click on the RSMatcher.exe file. A command prompt window will open first, followed by a graphical user interface window.
The referrals CSV file is expected to have one or more lines per teacher, but only one with schedule information. Each line can have multiple students from the same teacher. It is assumed that each teacher has a unique and consistent email address.
The coach registration CSV file is expected to have one line per coach. It is assumed that each coach as a unique volunteer ID (VID).
The assignments input is also the primary output from the matching algorithm. It is a CSV list of all student-coach assignments that have been made. When running the Reading Seed Matcher, the assignments file can be specified. This will instruct the algorithm to preserve those existing assignments, but it will still try to make any new matches it can make with any new updates to the input.
If an assignment has been manually created, but conflicts with schedules, it will be excluded as an invalid assignment. To override this behavior, the last column of the assignments CSV file contains either a timestamp or the text "manual" to indicate that this assignment was manually created and does not need to be checked for conflicts.
The assignments file is created in the output directory and it will overwritten on each run of the algorithm for a single school.
Reading Seed Matcher creates a database each time it is run. Once all input files and the output directory have been specified, clicking the Create Database button will create the database file called rsdb.json in the specified output directory. This file must not be deleted while the software is running. However, it may be deleted after the software has been closed. After the database has been created, the Create Database button is disabled. To specify different input files, Reading Seed Matcher must be closed and restarted.