The Mind, Brain, and Behavior (MBB) Laboratorium of UGM Psychology recently held a training session for experiment programs. The training is held every Friday in G206 and G207, starting from March 9 until March 30, 2018. This training is open for all psychology students in the faculty, from undergraduates to doctoral students, but the ones who applied came from just the undergraduate and graduate program. “Actually, there are doctoral students who wanted to to join, but couldn’t make it due to scheduling conflicts,” said Satrio Priyo, the manager of the MBB lab.
This training aims to give students knowledge about experimentation along with the knowledge on how to design the program. The training is also held to fulfill the needs of students in experiment program coding. OpenSesame is a program discussed in the training. “It has a great user interface, suitable for college students,” according to Satrio, who was also the trainer for the sessions.
The training is done in 4 meetings. Each meeting has different activities and targets. The first meeting introduced participants to various apps and sites that help in programming experiments. They were also asked to examine the design from an experiment. From this first meeting, the participants can hopefully understand the basic knowledge of computational experiment programming along with examples of it. In the second meeting, participants were introduced to OpenSesame. The target of the second meeting was for participants to know the ways to design the set up of an experiment program using OpenSesame.
Participants started making experiment programs on the third meeting. In this meeting, the program made was based on the design they have examined in the first meeting. They got to know about loops, variables, and blocks in this meeting. After this meeting, the participants will be able to understand basic coding to make experiment programs. In the fourth meeting, the participants will finish designing and making the experiment program. After that, steps such as collecting data and analyzing can be done. During the training sessions, participants could ask and consult the trainer if they found any difficulties. Through the activities in the fourth meeting, the participants are expected to know how to make and operate experiment programs and also overcome difficulties.
Tiwi, an undergraduate student, said that she enjoyed participated in this training. “Attending this was fun and beneficial,” she said. She hopes that this sort of training can be done more frequently so more students can participate. Satrio explained that there are plans of making this training a monthly event. “With the assumption that each batch can finish in one month,” said Satrio, who usually goes by the name Pipi.
Satrio hopes that participants can also learn to develop their programming skills independently. Furthermore, he hopes that they can explore more about experimentations, especially in the field of cognitive psychology. Satrio said that he’s happy to help give this training. He closed the interview by saying, “The participants were enthusiastic in following the training, I am really happy to be given this opportunity to meet and get to know them as well.”