Our externally imposed constraints are as follows:

  1. Labs are on fridays, as dictated by the registrar
  2. Our class schedule is MWT, dictated by the registrar—this matters both for matching content delivery up w/hw + being able to answer questions as they arise
  3. Students can be, and are, in time zones all across the world. Of course the majority are on Boston-time.
  4. Students do not have classes on Saturday and Sunday
  5. We can release HWs early, but realistically many/most folk will begin to get started on the next one some amount of time after the previous one is due.
  6. Likewise for the two pieces; realistically many/most folk will begin the 2nd half only after the 1st half is due

These are not right, wrong, or even judgments of a moral valence. This is merely descriptive of the state of affairs that exist in reality, in nature. Like any other natural phenomenon—hurricanes, monsoons, tidal waves—there’s no sense in getting in high dudgeon about it, but there is sense in factoring it into your plans. 

Because the lab dates and times are fixed, this argues for a regular, fixed, weekly homework schedule. So that the lab is consistently supportive of the homework, and we can plan for this support.

If I put it too far after lab, then there’s less immediate pressure of an impending due date to get the most out of lab. I want to set the short-term incentive structure up for getting the most out of lab, and being there, and being engaged. We want to use due-date incentives to nudge students to get a good start before lab, but to still have enough time after to make adjustments. Furthermore, putting the first half due too far after lab would then, based on 6. above, not give students enough time to work on the second part.

But if I put it too soon after lab, that could make the lab period itself more of a panic, rush thing. Students might feel that they don’t have enough time after their lab to internalize and take advantage of what they learned. Further, given that Drew does a /whole/ day of labs for us, a deadline too close to the end of labs could leave the people w/early am labs in a much better position. 

I have to both release the homework assignments (and based on 5. close the previous assignment) far enough in advance of lab for students to get a good running start on it, so they aren’t forced (forced a la forces of nature that shape human behavior) to come into lab without having yet looked at it.

To both scaffold the assignment, to try and level out what would otherwise be “due date panic periods”, and to try and lessen adverse impacts of our homework schedule directly aligning with the due dates of other-class X, we split it into two pieces.

We did also consider that people will want/take a “bit of a breather” between these due dates. We want to make sure and leave some weekend-time, when people’s schedules are most flexible, for students to work on both parts of the assignment together in their groups if they so choose.

Further, not that this matters right now for most of us and I hope everyone is remaining safe and vigilant, but Friday and Saturday nights have traditionally been some of the most otherwise-busy parts of students’ weeks, and thus inconvenient for deadlines.

Another small factor was that, while we can’t of course steer around every possible obligation, we did try and look for times that either didn’t conflict with, or ways that we could work around, large events: e.g. Valentine’s Day.

So, to summarize, the time between the due date of the last homework and the due date of the next homework should be a one week period. We’ll split it from one “big” assignment into two smaller ones. The due date of the first half should be roughly halfway between the due date of the second part of the prior assignment and the due date of the second part of this assignment. The first half should be due some time after the end of the last lab. It needs to be far enough out that no time zone forces a student to stay up all night to make use of the time between lab and the due date.

Saturday at 1pm left enough time after lab w/o impacting the out-of-Boston students, but left enough time to take a breather and still work on the next part together in groups before the beginning of the week (which, prior student surveys indicate usually begins on Sunday afternoon). Working backwards from this, actually, we came up with Wednesday deadlines for the main parts. We just recently this term considered that the release dates do not need to align with the last homework’s due date, and we added earlier release dates though for people for whom that schedule did not work.

I’m sure this was longer than you’d expected the answer to be. This was a non-trivial question, into which we factored a great number of considerations. There is no optimal, but of course if you have suggestions on how to further improve this constraint optimization solution, or additional constraints we’ve failed to consider, please do let us know!

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