FAQ

Home/FAQ
FAQ2020-04-30T06:49:26+10:00
Is Experimaker free to use?2020-06-26T13:56:02+10:00

Currently, Experimaker is in open beta and is fully free to use for research, academic and classroom purposes. It is not free for commercial use. If you would like to use Experimaker for commercial purposes, please enquire about a commercial license.

Once Experimaker is out of its beta period, we will continue to offer a core version free for academic use. We additionally plan to offer a premium version for all users.

Will you have an API?2020-04-30T06:45:50+10:00

Experimaker is primarily targeted at researchers who don’t want to code.

However, we do understand that custom scripting will always allow for a greater degree of flexibility than a GUI can. Experimaker has been designed from day 1 with the goal of releasing an API to allow for custom experiment scripts. The API will expose Experimaker concepts such as current blockon participant response, etc.

The timeline has been designed with the eventual release of the API in mind. Researchers will be able to easily add their own custom timelines, starting conditions, and events. This allows for an almost unlimited amount of freedom in experiment design. In addition, custom-coded timelines have been designed to allow for easy sharing. This will enable other researchers to use your custom-coded timelines within the GUI as usual.

Currently, the API is not the highest priority on our feature list – we feel that other missing features are likely to impact a greater number of researchers. However, if you disagree, please let us know! We modify our development plans based on the feedback we get from researchers.

What technology is Experimaker built on?2020-07-21T12:17:32+10:00

Experimaker consists of 3 separate components. Externally, users interact with 2 components: the Editor GUI, and the Experiment View. Internally, the experiment view can be divided into 2 parts: the Serenity engine and the high-level Experimaker code. When an experiment is run in participant mode, the Editor GUI is removed.

The Serenity engine (2001-2020) is a C++ Open GL engine, originally designed for 3D game development. This handles low-level tasks, such as rendering pixels and fonts. It includes a Python interface, and is built with WebAssembly. It is then rendered with WebGL. This is how we are able to display the Experiment View in the browser.

On top of this is the high-level Experimaker logic, which is written in Python. This handles tasks such as deciding which block should be displayed next.

The Editor GUI is written in Javascript, using the React Material UI library. This handles editing tasks. It takes editing inputs from the researcher – such as a change in the block ordering options – and transmits them to the Experiment View. When the Experiment View updates, the Python interface transmits these updates to the Editor GUI. For example, when participant input is received, the Python interface displays a new block, and tells the Editor GUI that a new block has been displayed. Then, this information is reflected in the sidebar and footer displays.

What features are planned for the future?2020-04-30T06:46:42+10:00

Please see our features page and forum for more details.

Do I have to store my data on your servers?2020-06-19T15:36:09+10:00

In this very early beta version, yes. However, we have plans to allow hosting of participant data on services such as Google Drive. Additionally, we plan to offer researchers the paid option to host specific experiments on their own servers if they wish. This means we would never have access to this data at any point in the process. If this is a feature you’re eager to see, please let us know. We rely on feedback from users to decide which features to prioritize, so this really makes a difference.

How should I reference Experimaker?2020-06-22T09:47:19+10:00

Please cite Experimaker as follows:

Schembri, Tamara, & Budziszewski, Peter. (2020). Experimaker: The first real-time WYSIWYG editor for behavioural experiments. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3902929