  Academic spaces in colleges and universities span classrooms for 10 students
to lecture halls that hold over 600 people. During the break between
consecutive classes, students from the first class must leave and the new class
must find their desks, regardless of whether the room holds 10 or 600 people.
Here we address the question of how the size of large lecture halls affects
classroom-turnover times, focusing on non-emergency settings. By adapting the
established social-force model, we treat students as individuals who interact
and move through classrooms to reach their destinations. We find that social
interactions and the separation time between consecutive classes strongly
influence how long it takes entering students to reach their desks, and that
these effects are more pronounced in larger lecture halls. While the median
time that individual students must travel increases with decreased separation
time, we find that shorter separation times lead to shorter classroom-turnover
times overall. This suggests that the effects of scheduling gaps and
lecture-hall size on classroom dynamics depends on the perspective - individual
student or whole class - that one chooses to take.
