Our CogSci workshop, “Using Mechanical Turk and PsiTurk for Dynamic Web Experiments” will be held on Wednesday July 31st at 2pm, in Room 5 (Dorotheenstraase 24-26, Lecture Hall 207).

If you are planning to drop by, you might want to take a couple of minutes to go over the following:

Accounts on Mechanical Turk

Please sign up ahead of the workshop for a AMT Worker account.
You’ll get the most out of the workshop if you also sign up for an AMT Requester account. Please do this ASAP as it may take 24 hours for an account to be activated. Note, if you are not living in the US or have access to a US credit card, you will not be able to sign up for a requester account. In that case, just try to get a worker account for now.

Bring a laptop

It will greatly enhance your experience to be able to follow along on your computer.

No Windows support

Note that currently the PsiTurk software is only available for Mac and Linux computers. Unfortunately it isn’t available for Windows, and likely never will be due to the constraints of running servers on Windows. What we suggest for Windows users is to use cloud services, such as Amazon’s EC2. We do plan to support running PsiTurk on OpenShift, which will make it easy to start up a server in the cloud no matter what platform you use.

Installation

To participate, it will help to install the PsiTurk toolbox before the workshop. Instructions are as follows:

1. PsiTurk relies on Python. For a kitchen-sink-included solution that works on all platforms, we recommend that you download the Enthought Python distribution available here. However, if your computer already has Python >=2.6 installed that may work fine..
2. Mac users: you also need to install a C compiler via XCode. To do so, follow the instructions listed here here (h/t Chris Street).
3. The easiest way to install PsiTurk is via pip. If you don’t already have pip, either install it with your package manager (if you know what that is) or by typing the following in a terminal:
   
   Shell

   cd /tmp curl -O 'https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py' python get-pip.py # If you get a permissions error, try typing sudo python get-pip.py

   1 2 3

   cd /tmp curl -O 'https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py' python get-pip.py # If you get a permissions error, try typing sudo python get-pip.py

   
   Once pip is installed, type into a terminal:
   
   Shell

   pip install psiturk

   1	pip install psiturk

   
   If you get a permissions error, try the following
   
   Shell

   sudo pip install psiturk

   1	sudo pip install psiturk

Getting help

We have a google group which you can use to post any questions regarding PsiTurk, the installation process, etc. If you are having trouble with the installation, by all means try to let us know before the workshop so we can try to address the problem. We would appreciate it if you could use this group mainly for PsiTurk questions, not for queries regarding programming in JavaScript, debugging your code, etc. There are better resources available for those questions (try http://stackoverflow.com for example).

 Check out some resources

If you already want to start learning about web development, gentle introductions to web development are available on Codecademy (lesson collections for HTML/CSS are available here and for Javascript are available here).  We especially recommend these if your programming experience is limited. You do not have to look at these before the workshop, but it will help you understand what you will eventually need to know to run your experiments online.

We look forward to seeing you on Wednesday!