A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement finds a same-card cooldown timer on the shared piano-practice-room terminal nearly eliminated self-rebooking, without measurably changing who was actually using the room.
An eight-week terminal audit finds blocked rebookings mostly resurface under a declared practice partner's name
A cooldown only slows down the card. It doesn’t slow down the friend standing next to its owner, holding a key of their own.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
The University’s six shared piano-practice rooms have run on the same terminal since a scheduling review three years ago: tap a student card, hold the room for up to ninety minutes. This term the terminal gained a rule of its own — a forty-five-minute cooldown before the same card can book again — after Facilities logged students holding a room past their slot by rebooking themselves the moment their session ended.
A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement, Passed to a Friend, Not Freed, audits what the cooldown actually changed. Researchers logged eight weeks of terminal bookings across all six rooms, tracking every blocked rebooking attempt and whatever booking followed it in the minutes after.
Same-card rebooking fell from 41% of slots to 6% within three weeks of the cooldown’s introduction — by that measure alone, a clean fix. But the share of slots going to a genuinely new booker barely moved, from 58% to 61% across the full eight weeks. Eighty-eight per cent of blocked rebooking attempts were followed within minutes by a booking from the same student’s declared usual practice partner.
“The room changed hands on the terminal’s own ledger,” said Dr Bram Ntuli, Lecturer and Convenor of Improvement Grand Rounds. “Whether it changed hands in the room is still the Grand Rounds’ next agenda item.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.bc4ruu.