Atsip 2006 Noel Taylor University of Hertfordshire

Developing with Authorware Testbed Revisited

Testbed ► ‘Testbed’ is a Response Test Generator Program, developed using Authorware

Testbed ► It is free ► Install on student notebooks ► Not intended for high level research projects ► Experiments setup quickly ► Many types of media ► Many types of experiment ► On-going developement

Types of stimuli ► Images – bmp, tiff, jpeg, wmf, pict, giff, psd, targa, png ► Sounds – wav, mp3, aiff, shockwave audio ► Plain Text ► Rich Text Files (from Word) ► Video – Quicktime or Avi ► Animations – flash, director, autodesk ► Pdf ► ‘stimuli lists’ of any combination of the above

Types of experiment ► Simple unevaluated response tests ► Evaluated response tests  correct/incorrect  Correct/neutral/incorrect ► Non-evaluated tests and surveys:  Likert Scales  Free Text Entry  Single key responses

Details of experiment types ► Text based tests can be configured as:  Basic Stroop Tests  To show x number of words before a response is required  Text can be formatted with colour, font size and screen position

Additional features ► Configure automatic time-outs ► Pre-configured ‘fixation events’ ► Configure ‘thankyou’ messages ► Configure ‘help screens’ ► Add questions to stimuli events ► Pause between stimuli, pause between blocks, pause between subjects ► Position stimuli on screen using drag and drop ► Change background colours to any colour ► Select stimuli randomly, alphabetical order, randomly with x repeats ► Group blocks together. ► Select blocks randomly, numerical order or manually at run time

Speed of setting up ► Testbed uses all the contents of a folder to create one block (except for word & stimuli lists) ► Block settings can be duplicated when creating new ones ► Blocks can be previewed from within the setup program. ► Evaluated responses assigned via standard list boxes

Response hardware ► Mouse devices ► Keys ► Serial port devices  Cedrus Response Pads  Voice Keys

Results files Testbed offers two types of results records: ► One file per subject – replicates the Superlab format  Advantage: easy for novice users to understand  Disadvantage: harder to import for analysis into SPSS/Excel ► One file per experiment – all subjects recorded in a single file  Advantage: harder for novice users to understand  Disadvantage: easier to import for analysis into SPSS/Excel

Authorware 7.0 ► Interactive learning materials negative points: ► Unfashionable  No Shockwave plugin  Poor design tools  Limited transparency effects ► Poor support – Adobe ► Not fully object oriented ► Overly linear ► Interpreted code, based on Pascal syntax

Authorware 7.0 main positive points: ► Rapid development tool  Linear model is intuitive  Icons aid visualisation of structure  System substructure handled by the Authorware runtime  Knowledge Objects  Many third party functions  Highly Extensible to programers  Flash & Director Xtras supported ► Imports Flash & Director under scripted control ► Cross platform & Internet ► Supports Javascript ► Supports wide range of media

Authorware & Testbed ► Multimedia synchronisation features:  More accurate timings than system clock  Multimedia clock also used by Superlab ► Built in support for wide range of media types ► Interpreted code has minimal effect at the crucial points in program

THERE WAS A DEMO OF AUTHOREWARE AT THIS POINT Testbed can be downloaded at: (it’s best to download the sample media files as well)