We produced this study not only as information for CS educators, but also as a quantified evidence for the theory in behavioral psychology stating that humans have learned to look for familiar situations, because they provide some sort of safety.

For this study, first, we counted up the number of times each student sat in each chair (in the laboratory, chairs located in front of the same computer are considered the same chair). Then, we classified the students as “students with a preferred location” (those that along the course were sat 70% of the times on the same chair) and “students who do not show any preference” (the rest). Results are shown in Table 1. This table shows that the preference for a particular chair is very extended. In laboratory sessions more than half of the students showed a preference (58.78%), while in theory sessions more than one third (35.48%) of the students showed preference.

If we raise the threshold to 80%, there still exists a clear difference between the preferences of students in theory sessions and in laboratory sessions, although the difference is less significative. These tables quantitatively show that there exists quite an important group of students that show preference for a particular chair. In this case, we do not perform any statistical analysis, we just release the collected and grouped data for future analyses.