Why a Coding Bootcamp for Psychology Students

We noticed that coding is one of the significant obstacles students face when working on a research project. People are scared and overwhelmed by the idea of having to code their experiments or analysis. Consequently, they tend to rely on more experienced students for this. Although this is fine, over-rely on someone else does not allow people to learn valuable skills. Furthermore, this means that students’ time management significantly depends on the time the people helping them can provide. From our experience, we know that coding can be tricky, but it can be fun and doesn’t have to scare people away. We would like to provide an opportunity to be introduced to coding in a way that empowers people to try to implement solutions for their studies more autonomously. Although there are some courses about R, Python, or Matlab, these are usually quite general and often do not offer the opportunity to apply what was taught directly. Here, instead, we are planning a BootCamp specifically focused on psychology and cognitive sciences.

Program

Day 1: Basics of coding and logical thinking – We will set the stage for the entire bootcamp by introducing the core concepts of coding and logical reasoning. Given the widespread use of ChatGPT, we will also address its use, covering the most common errors we see and providing a nuanced view of this tool in this context.
Day 2: Creating experiments with Psychopy – We use Psychopy to create a psychology experiment. Psychopy has the nice feature that it allows you to create an experiment through a GUI, but it also leaves the freedom to code as much as you want. Thus, we will start using the GUI and then add code to expand it.
Day 3: Analysing data with R - During this second day, we will move to R to analyse and visualise data. We will cover those aspects that everyone is likely to encounter in research, starting from data wrangling and cleaning, plotting, and some analyses. This day is designed to help you with your own work so that you can prepare your data for the analyses you need to conduct. Please note, although we will do some stats, this is not a statistics course. Our goal is to familiarize you with R and provide you with tools and knowledge that you can adapt to your specific needs.
Day 4: Matlab for signal processing and neuroscience – On the last day, we will move to Matlab and see how to work with digital signals. We will learn the difference between time, frequency and time-frequency domain through simulations. We will then see how these concepts apply to cognitive neuroscience by working on a real EEG dataset. Although this has a stronger focus on neuroscience, the ideas explored are helpful and can be expanded to other areas, too. It is an excellent opportunity to be gently introduced to powerful tools which are often associated with complex analysis.

Delivery and goals

We believe that coding can only be learned by doing. So, we will run the bootcamp in a highly interactive way, using group exercises and hands-on experience. We also like to keep the atmosphere informal, welcoming and friendly to make the experience enjoyable. We started this project to help students become comfortable with coding, and this remains our primary goal. We don’t want to make the false promise that you will be able to code proficiently after four days. What we want for you is to become comfortable with the trialand-error process that is at the core of coding. Our goal is to equip you with enough knowledge and practice so that the next time you need to code something, you will feel comfortable trying that by yourself. Finally, we want to facilitate the creation of a community. In our experience, we often rely on each other to solve some coding issues. Knowing when to ask and how to ask is an important skill to develop. During the bootcamp we will facilitate mutual help and review through peer-to-peer activities.