About the Course

"Introductory Programming for Online Social Science Experiments" first started as a workshop taught by Dr. Jiefeng Jiang (now at UIowa). Dr. Jiang taught his (then) fellow labmates (Drs. Anastasia Kiynoaga, Emma Wu-Dowd, Hanna Oh-Descher, Yu-Chin Chiu, Anthony Sali, Paul Muhle-Karbe, etc.) in Tobias Egner's lab how to code in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS and how to post online experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. He also created the lab's server database so that the data collected online could be transformed into text files for data analysis.

When Christina Bejjani and Peter Whitehead joined Dr. Egner's lab in 2016, Dr. Jiang hosted a four-hour workshop on the material. Once Dr. Jiang left Duke, Christina and Peter took over teaching the workshop and informally mentoring fellow graduate students and members of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. Since then, Christina has expanded the material from its original powerpoint and demo format into an organized course with separated modules and explicit learning goals. A full course is shown here on Github, but there are also videos and assessments (freely) available to (Duke) students through the associated Coursera.

With the help of this course, students should be able to participate in social science research more readily. Moreover, the skills obtained in this course should transfer over to research outside of academia: for instance, jobs in web development require HTML/CSS/JS skills, as do some UX researcher/design roles.

Through the generous support of the Bass Digital Education Fellowship at Duke University, Christina was able to convert and expand her prior experience and tutorial work into a fuller course.

To reflect the origins and funding from Duke, you will note that the fonts and color scheme adhere to the Duke University brand guide while following a basic tutorial-like design (cc: Bootstrap).

Christina created this website and course in her fifth-year as a PhD student. To find out more about her, please visit her website.

You can also see all the contributors on the Github page.