Read this blog post written by Dave Brown, Rob Woolley and Andrew Garrard, exploring how practical engineering lab activities can be successfully scaled up and delivered in large, non-specialist teaching spaces.
Their case study looks at how a 2nd-year thermodynamics activity was redesigned to run for larger cohorts with fewer sessions — reducing staff time, improving flexibility, and creating a lively learning environment, while also highlighting important considerations for student experience and support.
At Sheffield, we use innovative approaches to deliver practical teaching, such as workshop and laboratory classes, at scale. We aim to provide as much hands-on learning as possible. There are, however, limits to what we can offer. These limits may arise from timetable constraints, staff availability, or the amount of laboratory space.
One way to overcome constraints on laboratory space, make the best use of staff time, and simplify student timetables is to teach fewer lab sessions to larger cohorts in suitable teaching spaces. Laboratory rooms are often smaller and more specialised than general flat teaching spaces, so this opens up the question of whether certain laboratory activities can be scaled up by running them in large, non-specialist rooms. For an activity to be suitable for scale-up, the equipment needs to be:
●
inexpensive enough to provide
multiple sets
●
portable enough to be packed and
transported
●
simple enough for students to set
up and take down themselves
● unlikely to cause mess or damage to the teaching space
Case Study:
In the 25/26 academic year, this activity was scaled up and delivered in a flat teaching space with a capacity of 200. It ran twice, each time with 130 students working simultaneously (and the approach would permit up to 400 students without additional timetable demands).
Observations
To make the larger sessions manageable, students need to take greater responsibility for setting up and taking down the equipment, rather than relying on technical staff to do this in advance. While this requires clear instructions and uses some of the students’ learning time, it also increases students’ ownership of their experiment.
There is also a noticeable increase in the energy of the environment. Smaller sessions can feel “flat”, but with over 100 students working on an activity in a single space, there is a strong “buzz” throughout the room.
When running at this scale, careful consideration is needed
when planning the degree of "scaffolding" provided to students. For
efficiency, questions asked by students or common mistakes they can make can be
anticipated and mitigated in the teaching material. For learning, it can be
beneficial to engineer the session procedural speedbumps, to force students to
consider what they are doing, why they are doing it and to initiate a
conversation with lab staff. Addressing this tension is a delicate balancing act.
The increased number of students in a single space will
increase the possibility of students who have ASDs (diagnosed or not) becoming
overwhelmed or having self-regulation issues that will impact their ability to
engage with the lab activity or require them to leave. This would highlight the
need to limit the number of students, so the extraneous cognitive load is kept
to a manageable level.
Finally, the model was shown to be more efficient in
terms of GTA utilisation: not only were fewer GTA hours required, but it also
allows for greater flexibility. With multiple small sessions, some groups will
include students who need more support than others, leading to some sessions
having sufficient GTA resources and others not enough. By combining students
into a smaller number of sessions, these differences can be smoothed.
Garrard, A. Woolley, R. Brown, D. (2025). “Scaling Up Practical Engineering Labs for Teaching Spaces”. Centre for Engineering Education Blog, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. December 2025. [INSERT URL]