Labs

The twelve-week teaching schedule: what happens in each lab, what to prepare, and what leaves the room.

A Lab is where the week's material gets applied under supervision, in front of the other people in the room. Some weeks that means role-play — running an apology into the ground in front of a group who's watching for the exact moment it goes wrong. Some weeks it means a live edit — a 600-word message read aloud and workshopped down to one sentence on the spot. Some weeks it's a shared, tightly capped grocery budget everyone has to defend cutting from. Bring the case study, expect a demonstration, leave with feedback on the one decision you were least sure about.

Every Lab runs one hour, and every Lab runs the same hour underneath whatever it's about. The subject changes every week; the shape doesn't — twelve chances to get used to it, rather than twelve different formats to learn:

• A five-minute introduction, tying back to the previous week
• A first activity
• A presentation or class discussion of it
• A second activity
• A discussion or debrief of that
• A five-minute wrap-up

No laptops, phones, or other screens are used in any Lab, ever. A computer science student going a full hour without checking one is not a bit this course invented — it is, by reputation, rare enough to be worth scheduling on purpose.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014) found active-learning formats measurably outperform straight lecturing on exam performance across STEM courses — the reason this course treats the Lab as one half of a pair, not an optional add-on: the lecture sets up the research, the definitions, and the "how"; the Lab that same week is where it actually gets used.