I’m prepping a course to be taught in the Harvard Psychology department this coming Fall. We’ll be using PsychoPy and I have been putting together some videos as part of the process. Thought I’d share them here in case they’re helpful to anyone starting their journey with PsychoPy.
Is there a reason why you are primarily teaching Coder rather than Builder (I haven’t watched through the videos so apologies if the answer is already there).
My concern is that Coder teaches bad practices if you later switch to Builder (which you probably will if you want to run studies online)
Right now it seems like there’s more focus on the Coder (2 videos vs 1), but that’s just because the series isn’t complete yet. There will be more videos on Builder.
The reason we start with Coder is because the course is Programming for Psychologists so there’s an emphasis on getting students to understand/think programmatically. At the start of the semester, we work with basic Python. Then, we transition into PsychoPy and it works well to start with code there because it’s an opportunity to see the Python they’ve just learned in action.
Also, I find that if you teach any sort of visual builder first, it’s always harder to go backwards to code. Especially for “non-programmers”. They almost develop a fear of the code and avoid it knowing there’s a visual builder available. But if you empower them with some coding knowledge to start, it can go along way in understanding what the builder is doing and how to fix things when they fail. They can approach problems and error messages more holistically if they understand a bit more about what’s happening “under the hood”.