Faculty Collaborator: Matt Nassar
About:
Nick collaborated with Professor Matt Nassar on a project aimed at enhancing his neuroscience class. The project's objective was to enable students to customize their own experiment or game for real-world participants to play, thereby tracking behavioral data. These games were designed to simulate a simple one-armed bandit or slot machine scenario, allowing students to select the number of arms available for user choice. The project was developed using JavaScript to ensure it could be accessed online, utilizing a library called jsPsych to help create a timeline for the experiment. Despite encountering some challenges due to jsPsych's different syntax compared to standard JavaScript, Nick is optimistic about having a fully functional game ready by the project's conclusion.
Project Start
Objective: Coding project using HTML and JavaScript.
Task: Have students send out a website to collect behavioral data for class.
Plan: Initial iterations to test different parameters.
Getting Going
Start: Began with Code Academy (suggestion from project problem-solving session).
Library: Learned jsPsych (the library used for the project).
First Road Bump
Challenge: Limited coding experience made it difficult to start the project.
Solution: Assigned another project to strip down the code to use as a framework.
Issue: jsPsych library uses different syntax than learned from Code Academy.
Getting Going
Progress: Stripped down another experiment project to its bones to build my project.
Development: Worked on getting the front end of what my experiment will look like.
Second Road Bump
Realization: Initial project goal was out of reach.
Action: Had a conversation with Linda and Emily to adjust the scope and plan.
Meeting: Met with Matt to work together to change the end goal.
Reconstruction: Created the first iteration of the game with well-commented code.
Future Plans: Potentially create tutorial videos for others to quickly pick up the library.
Back into it & Moving Forward
Current Work: Creating the first iteration of the project.
Documentation: Ensuring the code is well-commented.
Additional Goal: Hopefully create tutorial videos given enough time.