Welcome to the project webpage for LabReady: Scalable GenAI-Powered Readiness Platform for Experiential Learning, an initiative funded through the University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning AI Fellowship Program. This project explores how structured, coach-based generative AI workflows can support student preparedness in laboratory and experiential learning environments through personalized readiness checks, guided conceptual review, and formative pre-class feedback.
Project overview
Laboratory and experiential learning courses are highly resource-intensive and rely heavily on students arriving with foundational knowledge and procedural familiarity. When students arrive underprepared, instructors and teaching assistants spend significant lab time repeating basic procedural explanations, reducing the time available for deeper inquiry, experimental reasoning, and troubleshooting. To combat this, LabReady will develop a multi-stage, GenAI-supported preparation workflow designed to act as a diagnostic pre-class check-in. Rather than a simple standalone chatbot, this structured platform guides students through concepts before class, probes their understanding, and provides actionable data to both students and instructors. The system will be piloted and evaluated within undergraduate physics laboratories to establish a highly scalable readiness model.
Key pedagogical innovation & AI components
- The Problem Addressed: Static pre-lab quizzes often fail to capture student misconceptions, while rising course enrollments and limited instructional resources make manual readiness checks impossible at scale.
- The GenAI Approach: Avoids fragile "mega-prompts" by breaking the workflow into smaller, manageable, and highly controllable algorithmic stages. Students complete a guided conversational interview that probes conceptual readiness, equipment familiarization, and pre-lab troubleshooting scenarios.
- The Coach Model: The platform strictly positions GenAI as a diagnostic coach rather than an academic shortcut, forcing students to articulate scientific reasoning in their own words before entering the lab environment.
Project fellows
Dr. Brenda Lee, Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, Faculty of Science
Joshua Crone, Lead Lab Instructor, Faculty of Science
Co-investigators
Mirko Vucicevich, Director, Digital Integration, Dean's Office, Faculty of Science
Transferability and broader relevance
Adaptability for Instructors
The LabReady pipeline is modular from the ground up, segregating content ingestion, question generation, agent configuration, and reporting. Instructors with no prior GenAI experience can participate fully via an integrated human-in-the-loop review step, allowing them to easily evaluate and modify question sets without touching the code. Advanced users can choose to customize underlying prompts and dive deeply into data analytics.
Anticipated outputs and project deliverables
As the project advances through its developmental phases, the team will publish and distribute a suite of practical tools for the broader UWaterloo community. Deliverables will be shared on this project website and via broader University-wide communication channels. Stay tuned!