oTree Workshop Materials

• Overview of popular platforms: Ztree, Google Forms, jsPsych, Qualtrics, and oTree.

1.2 Core Concepts of Coding Experiments

• Core experimental logic: stimulus presentation and response collection.
• Basics of server-client relationships, including roles of the server (database, task manager, web app) and client (web browser).

1.3 oTree Overview

• Advantages and limitations of oTree for experimental research.
• Demonstration: oTree admin panel and basic settings.
• Sample experiment: Guessing Game (Chapkovski example).

• Introduction to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework:

• Models: Core and Database (Starlette, SQLite/PostgreSQL).
• Pages: Page logic and settings (Starlette).
• Templates: Front-end structure with HTML, CSS (quazi-Jinja2, Bootstrap), and JavaScript.

2.1 Setting Up the Environment

• Development setup: Conda, IDEs, (optionally Git and Heroku client).
• Creating virtual environments and starting a new oTree project.
• Local deployment of an oTree app.

2.2 Detailed Structure and Workflow in oTree

• Building blocks of experimental games.
• Understanding oTree’s data processing capabilities.
• Anatomy of an oTree page and available page methods.
• Reviewing the event sequence diagram for experiment flow and oTree instruments (roles, stages, payoffs, etc).

2.3 Hosting and Resources for

• Comparison of hosting solutions (Heroku vs. self-hosting).
• Brief overview of oTree3 vs. oTree5, oTree Studio, oTree Lite, and oTree Hub.
• Online Recruitment Solutions. Introduction to online recruitment platforms: Toloka, Prolific, and MTurk.

3.1 Brief Overview of Advanced Options in oTree

• Capabilities and Customization. Reviewing group-based experiments, live pages, randomization, and custom templates, timeouts, adaptive experimental designs, etc.

3.3 Development Patterns (if have time)

• Designing user-flow diagrams and planning user scenarios before coding, Implementing test-first methodologies to verify experiment flow.
• Helpers: jsfiddle, cursor, etc
• Function calls, monitoring server workload (Bots, browser bots), etc.

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