Resources

Staying up-to-date and getting help

  • Most communication among CHS researchers happens via the MIT Lookit Slack workspace. Fill out this form to receive an invite. This is the best place to get the most up-do-date information about the site, ask general questions, and get tech support!

  • If you’re looking for information about building experiments on our platform, see the separate documentation pages for the Lookit Ember Frameplayer (“Lookit EFP” tab at the top of the navigation menu), and CHS’s custom jsPsych experiment builder (“jsPsych” tab).

  • Check out our FAQ page, or search the site using the search bar above the navigation menu.

  • Join the Lookit-research email list for occasional (2-4x/year) progress updates.

CHS learning materials and other resources

Below is a list of more information and resources about CHS. Some of these links provide a high-level overview of the platform that might be useful, for instance, while getting started, training other lab members, or introducing CHS to colleagues or families. There are also other materials that researchers might find useful for recruitment or learning how to use the site.

“Children Helping Science” vs “Lookit”

Note that most of these materials were created prior to the merger between Children Helping Science and Lookit, and therefore use the “Lookit” term to refer to the entire site infrastructure. We now refer to the “Lookit” website/platform as “Children Helping Science” (CHS), and we still use the “Lookit” term for the internal experiment runner. Also, some of the screenshots etc. used in the learning materials here might be out of date. Please refer to tutorial and other pages on this website for the most up-to-date information.

Please help us add to this list!

If you’ve given a presentation about using CHS or prepared training materials for your lab, please share them here! You can add them to this page directly via a Github pull request, or contact us on Slack or email (childrenhelpingscience@gmail.com).

Online experiments

Building on previous advances is a core part of every scientific discipline. There are additional advantages to using standard approaches in online child research: some families will choose to participate in studies from multiple researchers, and using standard approaches can lead to a more consistent experience. This can be especially important when trying to minimize “cognitive load” for young children. Below are links to a variety of groups developing approaches and discussing options. Some of these links are starting points that link to other resources (e.g., example PowerPoint or Keynote slides for consent and warmup).

CHS code, issues, and features

Running into a problem and want to check if it’s a known issue, or have an idea for a handy new feature? Check out and/or add to the Github Issues for the relevant software below. Or check out projects to take a look at what’s coming up in terms of development!

All CHS code is open-source (MIT License - this is a liberal open-source license, not related to us being at MIT) and publicly available. It will stay that way.