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Media and Development Lab, Hamilton College - Java Swing desktop slideshow application for psychology experiments

slideshow

Media and Development Lab, Hamilton College - Java Swing desktop slideshow application for psychology experiments

This project was design as experimental stimuli for a psychology lab. The finished program was used to generate data that was later published.

Sage, K. (2014). What pace is best? Assessing adults’ learning from slideshows and video. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 23(1), 91-108.

Sage, K., Bonacorsi, N., Izzo, S., & Quirk, A. (in revision). Controlling the slides: Does clicking help adults learn?

A series of magic tricks were broken down into frames. The program displays these frames at various paces as a slideshow. The pace can be set by the experimenter. The pace options include:

Set Pace - slides advance automatically every x number of milliseconds.

Set Pace Free Pause - slides advance automatically every x number of milliseconds, but the slideshow can be paused by clicking the mouse.

Set Pace Subgoal Pause - slides advance automatically up to pre-determined break points where they automatically pause. Users must click to continue and the slides advance automatically again.

Set Pace Timed Pause - slides advance automatically and pause automatically ever x number of slides. Users must click to continue and the slides advance automatically again.

Yoked Pace - slides advance automatically at the same pace as a previous user. The time per slide and the trick order is extracted from a previous datafile. Note that this was used in a previous version of the study and was not necessary for this study, as a result this mode was not fully implemented in this version of the program, but the mode was left in the menu as a stub for future use if necessary.

Self Pace - slides advance only when the user clicks the mouse.

Note that between tricks in all of the studies the slides will not advance without hitting enter. This was to allow the experimenter to give participants further instructions before they begin the next set of slides.

The program was written in Java using the Swing package. The most challenging portion of this project was nimbly loading the images as they are needed. There are 737 images at a total of 32.4 mb of data. Loading them all in advance was not possible on the system being used. Instead they are loaded just in advance of when they are needed and the viewed images are cleared from memory to make room for new ones.