On having the right size laboratories

Laboratory experiments form a vital part of any engineering course and consequently, students can spend a lot of their time on them. Most laboratory experiences are run independently of their associated lectures and tend to be free-standing. This is due to the way that students typically circulate through a limited number of sets of equipment over the duration of the course. There has been little work done on the organisation of labs and how the spaces might better support the learning experience. This article describes a novel approach using large laboratories with multiples of equipment which are shared between several departments to get both good equipment usage and the positioning of labs in the timetable to coincide with the associated topics being introduced to the students. This is reinforced with a few equations to allow the design of laboratories to take place. Example numbers using the Sheffield University Lab size (quantum) of 80 are used to show the power of this approach. Finally, the author uses his experience of operating this approach at the University of Sheffield for the past 7 years to show that this system has worked well. He also discusses some of the difficulties of this system so others can follow this method or a variation of it.