Mark Edwards is the physics department head. The studio classroom uses standard rectangular lab tables.
As of Fall 2008, we are teaching *all* of our cal-based intro physics courses serving about 360 students per semester.  It’s a big jump for us. So much so that we have outgrown our studio room and have had to rearrange another one to fit 2 of the total of 9 sections in it! We intend to be fully “studio” as we call it by fall of 2010. In that case we will need 3 rooms.
In May we (the whole department led by Dr. Delena Gatch) re-submitted an NSF CCLI proposal intended to fund equipping the new studio room. We will hear back around the end of November.
The reason we used square tables is that the room we used already had 16 3-ft by 5-ft tables (nice stone-topped dissection benches). Thus it would have been really expensive to purchase new tables and there was no place to put the ones we had. Thus, we used pairs of tables to make 5-ft by 6-ft tables that seat 6 students easily with plenty of room to do labs.
