¶ Scheduling for Lower Division Labs
A lower division lab schedule must be made for every quarter. Here is an example:
The first image above shows the weekly schedule for the labs themselves; the second image shows the schedule for the corresponding "flips" and TA meetings which have to happen in order to facilitate the labs (to "flip" a lab means to put away the equipment for one week's lab and set up the equipment for the next week's lab). Flips always have to happen after the week's last section and before next week's first section. The scheduling for the TA meetings can be more lenient and will depend on the TA's availability. In either case, make sure you always take into account the time and day of the week for each section in each lab course (which you can always check at this website: https://my.sa.ucsb.edu/public/curriculum/coursesearch.aspx).
To begin making a new quarter schedule, the easiest thing to do is to go find a schedule from a previous year for that quarter and make a copy to use as a template. Obviously, you'll first want to clear out any field containing outdated information like the dates for each week and the order of labs, flips, and meetings; and denote the correct quarter in the top left. Next, fill in the correct dates for each week and make sure that the schedule includes all the lower division lab courses being offered for the quarter, and that all of the room numbers listed for each course each week are correct.
The next thing to do is figure out which weeks of the quarter have holidays in them by checking the academic calendar on the school website. For each week with a holiday, highlight the corresponding row in orange as shown in the example above. You should also add a note on the schedule sheet specifying the day of the week that the each holiday lands on. If a holiday falls on a day with a lab section, then either that lab should not be held that week, or (if it is unavoidable) that section has to be moved to another day.
The last (but defintely not least) thing to consider is our inventory. Before the schedule is finalized, it's VERY important to make sure that there is enough equipment to set up every lab that is running during any given week. The best practice here is to make an inventory checklist for every piece of equipment required for all the labs to run together each week and then check the classrooms and storerooms to confirm that we have a sufficient supply of whatever is needed. The caveat here is that it would be overly burdensome to count each individual piece of equipment, so checking the inventory should really be a matter of making sure that any broken equipment from previous quarters has been repaired or replaced and that there is no week in the schedule where the number of sets of a particular piece of equipment needed is greater than the number of sets we have of that piece of equipment. For example, both 4L and 20BL run the e/m Ratio lab in Winter, but we only have enough e/m apparatuses to supply one class at a time, so we cannot schedule the e/m Ratio lab on the same week for both 4L and 20BL.
Additionally, we have graphics for the lab schedule and TA assignments which go on the course website (Canvas) for each lab course which have to be made along with the schedule. Here are some examples:
All previous course schedules can be found in the Google drive under PHYS_ILG -> Schedules (folders are labeled by school year). Any time a new schedule is made it should be uploaded there.
¶ 6(ABC)L
With Physics 6(ABC)L we are heavily impacted. We do not have enough space for all of the students to have lab every week. What we do instead is run one lab over a two week cycle and break the students up into two groups. We call the two groups A and B. The students can identify their groups by looking at the room number for their section. If it ends in an “A” they are in the A group, if it ends in a “B” then they are in the B group. The A group has their lab during the first week of the two week cycle while the B group does not come to lab. Then in the second week of the cycle, B group comes to lab, while the A group stays home. This way we are able to hold class for all of the students that need to take our physics labs.
An ideal schedule might look something like this:
We have found in the past, the students tend to have an issue with some of the basic math and the plotting during the labs. To help out we instigated a Lab Math assignment that is done before the first week of labs. For this and other reasons described below we typically don't hold lab during the first week of class.
When it comes to making the schedule there are a few things to consider that are common among the three lab courses:
- No Labs the first week
- It gives the lecture a chance to get ahead of the labs.
- Hopefully the students will have seen something related to the labs before coming in.
- It helps with dealing with add codes.
- During that week the UGrad Physics Advisors should have set up the course that Gold will automatically add students from the waitlist for the first five days of instruction. Thus, if anyone drops the class during the first week, and someone else wants that class and is on the waitlist, they will then be automatically added into the class. Thus, hopefully on the first week of labs, the TA’s won’t have to do any sort of adding manually. In Fall, TA’s may still have to add students manually Thursday and Friday of the first FULL week of instruction.
- Lab Math
- This also gives us a chance to give an assignment that the students can do at home to get them prepared for what is to come in the lab. Currently the lab math assignment is meant to help students learn how to plot, but it was more focused on plotting by hand. We could have it be more of an exercise in using Google Sheets/Excel, or Desmos to make a plot.
- TA Prep
- Without this down time, (no labs on week 1). The TA’s would have to come in on the morning for the first day of class so that they can be trained how to do the lab. They will also have to be informed of all the logistics of running the course in that same meeting.
- Sometimes, not all of the TA’s would be able to make it to that meeting and you would have to hold a second meeting to train the rest of them.
- TA Meetings
- No labs the first week also helps with getting the TA’s settled in. You could potentially have a meeting early that week to cover Logistics of the course as well as lab safety, then meet on Friday of the first week to cover the first lab.
- If you don’t split this into two meetings then there is A TON of information to be covered, most of which will just be lost on the TA’s from information overload.
- It gives the lecture a chance to get ahead of the labs.
- No Labs the last week.
- Not always possible.
- It depends on when holidays land, and how everything is spaced out.
- TA Grading Time.
- We have found that it is advantageous for TA’s to not have labs on the last week of instruction for grading purposes. They often times need that time to catch up and finish grading. Having their own finals to deal with also makes it challenging to grade. Thus, finishing everything week 9 of the quarter give them an extra week to do all the grading that needs to be done.
- Make-Up Day Considerations
- In terms of Make-Up day this can be done at two different times now. It is possible to have it on Friday of week 9, or Friday of week 10. (In theory it could be done any day of week 10 as well, Friday is typically chosen because students tend to be less busy Friday afternoon.)
- Week 9 can benefit the TA’s in terms of grading as well, though they shouldn’t be heavily impacted by the number of assignments to grade during make up week.
- Week 9 can also help the students because they won’t have to do an assignment during dead week, and the weekend before finals.
- Week 10 gives the Lab Coordinator more time to flip and set up the labs. You will essentially have a whole week instead of just a morning to do it.
- Not always possible.
¶ Fall
In the Fall we run into some difficult challenges. Firstly, the quarter starts on a Thursday. This is because the first Thursday and Friday and the Monday through Wednesday of Thanksgiving week combine to make one full week. Since we don’t hold class on the first Thursday and Friday of the quarter or during Thanksgiving week we effectively have a 9 week quarter. This pretty much means that we can’t have the “Week 10” week of no labs that we prefer. Fortunately, this is not an issue if lab sections are only scheduled on Mon, Tues, and Wed (no labs Thurs or Fri).
The next issue that arises is Veteran’s Day. If we only have 9 weeks to fit in all of the labs we can’t cancel the week with Veteran’s Day in it. This means that we typically have to move students from the day of Veteran’s day to a Friday. The key thing to remember when moving a class is that you don’t move it to a Friday that is a flip day. The easiest way to phrase it is to move the class to a Friday of an A week. This prevents students from being in the lab the day you need to flip. If we're lucky, Veteran's Day will fall on a day with no scheduled lab sections (usually Friday) and then we don't have to worry about it.
¶ Winter
Like all quarters winter comes with its own quirks. Those are the lack of Monday sections, the two holidays that happen early in the quarter, and that there are four labs running at once. The first and second quirk are related. The reason that the UGrad Advisors try to not have lab sections on Mondays is that we need every week for labs. If we had classes on Monday we would run into conflicts with the two Monday holidays: Martin Luther King Jr. Day and President’s day.
If there were Monday lab sections we would have to do one of two things:
- We would have to reschedule all the sections that fall on the two holidays to Friday sections. The problem with this is that it can be logistically difficult to get the undergrads and TA’s to be able to make a Friday section.
- We cancel labs during those weeks. The problem is that we wouldn’t be able to have the ideal schedule. We would lose two weeks, so we wouldn’t have any time with no labs happening. This affects the TA’s mostly, but in some severe ways. We would have to have meetings on the first Monday of the quarter and we would not have the grading buffer at the end of the quarter.
Not holding lab sections on Monday eliminates the need to either option and has the best outcome for undergrads and TA’s. We should try to avoid labs on Mondays during these quarters as much as possible.
The final issue happens in both Winter and Spring quarters. We should be holding 3L, 4L, 6AL, and 6BL. Having four TA meetings on one day as well as having to do four flips on one day can be quite difficult. Because of this we have in the past tried to not have the 3L or 4L on Thursdays. This gives us an extra day to flip some of the labs and potentially hold meetings. Another solution we have tried is to hold the 6L TA meetings and/or do the 6L flips on Monday of the following week instead.
¶ Spring
With Spring quarter, the main challenge that presents itself is Memorial Day which is always observed on the last Monday of May. Unlike in Winter, we cannot avoid having labs scheduled on Mondays, which means that for whatever week Memorial day falls on we have a couple options:
- Reschedule all the Monday sections that week.
- As mentioned before, this is most likely logistically infeasible.
- It might not even be possible to find a date and time that accomodates all the Monday students and TA's schedules.
- Don't hold labs that week.
- This means we will have to hold labs during week 10.
- Most likely, makeups will happen on the Friday of week 10.
- TA's will be on a bit of a time cruch to get grading done on time, but as long as they have not lagged behind severely with the grading in previous weeks they should be okay.
Most often, we elect to go for option 2 in this situation for the reasons mentioned above. This means that it is even more pertinient to ensure that the TA's are grading the labs on time each week so they aren't completely slammed right before the week of finals!
¶ Summer
In the summer, we have 6A and 6B running in session A, and just 6B running in session B. The bad news is that we only have six weeks to run a full quarter's worth of labs. The good news is that these classes are much less impacted in the summer than during the rest of the year, so we don't have to divide the class up into an A group and B group like we do in other quarters. This means that actually, since there are only five labs in the course (including the math lab in week 1), the six week timeline works out perfectly with plenty of time for make-ups and TA grading in week 6.
We do, however, still run into the issue of summer holidays. In session A, there's Juneteenth on June 19th and Independence Day on July 4th. In session B, there's Labor day which falls on the first Monday of September. There's a few ways this can go:
- Ideally, we should let our department advisors know early on in Spring quarter what days those holidays fall on for each session and have them not schedule any lab sections on those days. This is by far the cleanest and most headache-free solution.
- If for one reason or another we cannot avoid scheduling sections on a weekday with a holiday things are a little more messy:
- Plan A in this case should be to reschedule the holiday lab to a Friday.
- Plan B is to have the students attend make-ups, whevenver they are scheduled, to make up the holiday lab.
- Most likely, we will end up having to do some combination of Plan A and Plan B since some students won't be able to make either the Friday section or the make-ups.
¶ 3L
¶ Fall
In the Fall, 3L takes place over two rooms. Those two rooms are 3332 and 4231. There will also be two groups, Yellow and Blue. Both groups will have class in both of the rooms throughout the quarter. The ugrads can determine which group they are by looking at the room number for the classroom in Gold. The room number will end in a letter Y or B. Y means Yellow group and B means Blue group. It doesn’t matter what the actual numbers are for the room, their group is only determined by the final letter.
We do the two group system to accommodate all of the ugrads that are required to take this class without having to double the amount of equipment that we need. Since we have two rooms available to us, one potential solution is to have the yellow group meet in one room and the blue group meet in the other room while everyone does the same lab. That would mean that we need to have double the equipment so that we can accommodate 48 students at once.
The other option, and the way that we do it, is to have both the Yellow group and Blue group do the first two labs concurrently since the first two labs require the same setup (pendulum) and we have enough equipment to accomodate both rooms at once for those labs. Then, the third week of labs the Blue group does not come into class while the Yellow group does Lab 3. Then, the next week the Yellow group switches rooms for the next lab while the Blue group does Lab 3 using the same setup. This pattern continues for the rest of the quarter (example shown below). The only downside to this method is that we can only have a maximum of nine labs, but we currently only do seven labs anyways, so there is effectively no downside.
Another option to consider is having the students show up to the same room every week instead of having to move rooms. While this certainly would make it logistically easier for the students it would be a large burden on the ILG. We would have to then have to move all of the equipment from one lab to another every Friday. This can be a challenge with other flips going on as well as dangerous for the equipment. Because of this, we choose to deal with the logistics of having the students move between rooms.
For 3L in Fall, we also have to worry about Veteran's Day which we deal with the same way we deal with it for 6L. Unfortunately, 3L doesn't have the A and B week structure that 6L has so it can be difficult to find a good day to hold the makeup that isn't a flip day, though it's usually not impossible.
¶ Winter
In Winter, 3L is held only in room 3332. There are two Monday holidays that could potentially affect the scheduling but often do not because usually our physics advisors will schedule the sections to be on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. If this is the case, there are no holidays to be concerned with. In the past though, we still have scheduled around the holidays for 3L or put in break weeks for midterms. Typically, there are not many sections of 3L in the Winter since most students take it in the Fall.
There are 4 lower division lab classes running at once during Winter quarter; this can make scheduling TA Meetings and flips difficult. Be careful not to schedule all of the TA meetings on one day. Since 3L only runs one 2 or 3 days of the week in Winter there is a potential to have the TA meeting on a different day. Careful of selecting Monday TA meetings. This is possible, but you need to verify that you won’t be having a meeting on a holiday first.
¶ 4L
¶ Winter
4L is always held in 4231. There are two Monday holidays in Winter. The first is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, held on the third Monday of January. The second is President's Day, held on the third Monday of February. Unlike 3L, 4L will most likely have sections scheduled on Mondays since most students take it in the Winter. So, we do not hold labs during the weeks those holidays fall on. Luckily, 4L only has six labs total, which is just the right amount to have no labs the first week of the quarter, have makeups the last week, and have two weeks of no labs in the middle of the quarter. You can see just how this works out in the example Winter schedule at the top of the page.
¶ Spring
Again, 4L is always held in 4231, and scheduling for Spring is even easier than Winter. The only holiday of concern in Spring is Memorial Day on the last Monday of May. This means we can have no labs the first week, do all the labs between weeks 2-7, have makeups on week 8, and no labs week 9 or 10. This is as easy as lab scheduling gets!
¶ 5L & 20(ABC)L
Deborah (Dr. Fygenson) runs the 20L labs throughout the year and 5L in Spring with our support. We coordinate with her to determine scheduling every quarter.