7. Finishing steps

You’re in the home stretch! Thanks for sticking with it. We’ll wrap up by revisiting Github issues and briefly mentioning some of the advanced features you might use in the future.

1. Making your first Github issue or comment

Now that you’ve created your first two studies and practiced some of the day-to-day study management tasks you’ll do on Lookit, you’ve almost certainly thought of something you wish you could do easily on Lookit - or just something you found confusing.

As we discussed at the start of the tutorial, Lookit is an open-source project meant to serve the research community, and we need everyone to contribute to keep making it better! One of the best ways to contribute is to document the problems you encounter and the ideas you have for improvement.

Let’s practice that now. First, think of either a problem you encountered or something you’d like to see, in any of these categories:

  • The documentation, including the tutorial you’re reading now
  • The Lookit platform, including login/account system and the experimenter inferface (study management, data viewing/download, consent coding, participant messaging, etc.)
  • The frameplayer, including what frames are available to you to use in designing your studies and how they function

Review the section on Github issues and click the appropriate link above to view the current issue list. Either create a new issue if your idea/problem isn’t already described, or comment on an existing issue!

2. Some advanced options to be aware of

Although we hope this tutorial has provided a solid introduction to designing and managing your Lookit study, it doesn’t cover everything it’s possible to do! The goal is that upon completion, you are ready to learn about more advanced options using the rest of the documentation. Here are some examples of topics you may be interested in exploring as you continue:

3. So what comes next?

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to use Lookit, you’re ready to start setting up the study you want to run! One frequent question is how long this will take. Once you have your study completely planned out–the design, instructions, and stimuli all ready–it’s likely to be very quick, perhaps a few days to implement. But the (unanimous) experience of researchers who have beta-tested Lookit is that it takes much longer than expected for purely non-technical reasons: the process of fleshing out stimuli and instructions often brings up substantive issues about experimental design that might not have been caught as early when piloting in the lab.

In addition to the technical preparations you’re making to be able to implement your study, you’ll want to make sure you’re ready to go from a legal and IRB standpoint! See IRB and legal info for details. Basically, though, you’ll need to get an institutional agreement signed; complete a short quiz about the Terms of Use because otherwise no one reads them; and include data collection on Lookit in your IRB protocol.

You can go ahead and:ref:create a lab<labs> at any point, and it’ll be approved once you’ve done the steps above.

4. The last step: please give feedback on the tutorial!

One last request: please fill out the Google form to give feedback that will be used to help improve this tutorial. Thank you!