Creating a new experiment type
Creating new experiment types is one of the most common tasks for an experimenter. Using a simple example (i.e. a story completion experiment), we'll explain how this task can be achieved easily.
- After clicking on "Create experiment" (on the landing page) you'll see an overview page that lists all currently existing experiment types. To create a new experiment type, click on the grey "Create a new experiment type" tile.
The first thing you have to do is choosing a name for you new experiment type. This name must consist only of alphanumeric characters and must be unique amonst all experiment types. We choose "DEMOStoryCompletion" to be our experiment type name. Sometimes you want participants to see only one specific list you have, or you want to let them do as many as they want. This condition handling functionality can be managed by choosing one of the available options that are displayed below the name input field. Since we do have only one list for our fictitious experiment, we can use the default value, which forces the participants to complete all items in this list. The last thing you have to do in order to create the experiment is specifying your experimental materials, i.e. the data you need to store in the database. In our case we oviously have a string that represents the story that should be completed. Additionally, we want to store another String that contains some type information. Although the value of this variable shouldn't be displayed to the participant later on, it will is still stored. After the new experiment is configured, we can press the "Submit" button to store store it.
- 3 Now you've successfully created your new experiment type. That means LingoTurk creates some things internally that should correspond to the information you enetered before. At this point, LingoTurk adds your new experiment type to the overview page and you are able to instantiate your new experiment type, as it is described here: Instantiating an experiment
- 4 When you view the instantiated experiment you will see something similar to the image below:
As you probably see, the data you specified when instantiating the experiment is loaded and displayed in a "raw" way automatically when the experiment page is viewed. (On the picture you see a javascript object that contains the data of a single item. Remember the variables we picked when creating the experiment type? Here they are.) The next step is to specify which parts of the data should be displayed to the participants and what they have to do in order to complete the experiment. This needs to be done by changing the automatically generated code at lingoturk/app/views/ExperimentRendering/<experimentName>Experiment/<experimentName>Experiment.scala.html. (Note: We are aware that the need of looking these files up and changing them directly is not optimal. That's why we plan to implement an interface that supports you while doing so)
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