Classroom Group Work Simulation

Team

Team size 5 students

Skill variance 0.30

Task Assignment

Communication Style

Project Progress

0%In progress…

Effective throughput

0.0 u/day

Coordination overhead

Est. completion

0.0 days

Social-loafing factor

100%

How it works

Each of the n students has an individual skill rate s_i (spread controlled by the variance slider). Two real, named group-work effects reduce the raw sum of skills before any work gets done:

Ringelmann effect (social loafing):
  L(n) = clamp(1 - 0.025·(n-2), 0.55, 1)

Brooks's Law (coordination overhead):
  links = n-1            (hub / chain)
  links = n(n-1)/2       (mesh)
  overhead = clamp(0.05 · links · latency / n, 0, 0.85)

Effective throughput:
  T = [ Σ s_i ] · L(n) · assignmentFactor · (1 - overhead)

Task assignment — Specialized (skill matched to task) keeps 100% of raw capacity; Round-robin loses some to mismatch (85%); Random loses the most (65%).
Communication style — Mesh has the most links but the lowest per-link latency; Chain has few links but handoff delay compounds; Hub sits in between and bottlenecks at the leader.
Social loafing — as the team grows, average individual effort drops (the classic Ringelmann/Latané "social loafing" finding from real group-work research), partially offsetting the extra hands.

The project needs a fixed 60 work units; the progress bar and the central task tower fill at the resulting effective throughput. This mirrors why real classroom (and workplace) group projects have a "sweet spot" team size — too few hands and the work is slow, too many and coordination/loafing eat the gains.

Student (skill-shaded) Task tower (progress) Communication link

⚠ Couldn't load the 3D engineThree.js failed to load from the CDN. Check your connection and reload.