Description

Psychology Beginnings was designed by Trent University's Online department in collaboration with Trent's Psychology department. In this module you will learn about introductory concepts in psychology and how these core concepts combine into the larger field of psychology. More importantly, you will experience new ways of thinking about these concepts and how they apply to everyday life. While Psychology beginnings was designed for introductory psychology students, these modules are suitable for anyone with an interest in learning more about psychology.

Aim

The aim of this module is to introduce a broad range of students to core concepts in psychology. The modules aim to provide reinforcing, basic understanding of core theories and challenge students with numerous interactive examples.

The Technology behind the Psychology

Psychology Beginnings was created to provide a simple way to review the basics of psychology but that doesn’t mean that the modules themselves were simple to create. Beyond the interactive presentation of the subject matter lies an elaborate work of code that makes the modules function. Over the course of three months, from mid-October 2015 to January 2016, graduate student Carly Bumbacco selected the psychology information while Trent Online’s Tully Privett both put together the visuals and wrote the code that powers the educational experience.

The underlying foundation used in the creation of Psychology Beginnings was Bootstrap, an open source framework for HTML, CSS and Javascript that helps developers with the creation of their web-based projects. Bootstrap gives creators the ability to access pre-designed elements and fit their content into rectangles that can be arranged on the page. It also permits the website appearance to change based on the screen size it is being displayed on. Using these tools, Tully was able to create the modules so they became useable on all sorts of devices; phone, tablet or computer.

Bootstrap is great, but it would serve little purpose without the HTML, CSS and Javascript that accompanies it. Simply put, Hypertext Markup Language is the skeleton of a web page that helps hold the content in place. Cascading Style Sheets are used to manipulate the way the content looks on the page, by changing things like the font and colour of text, the colour of backgrounds, and other stylistic elements. Javascript is a programming language that can be used to run programs in a web browser and is often used to incorporate interactive portions into a website. Using Dreamweaver, Adobe’s program for web development, Tully built the modules using the various languages.

In order to develop a set of modules that would remain usable and easy to update for a significant length of time, the code used to create them needed to be as current as possible. This meant that Tully worked to ensure that the vast majority of elements used or were compatible with HTML5, the most current iteration of the markup language. This limitation meant that some of the available pre-developed options for interactive activities like drag-and-drop answers had to be passed up for self-constructed code. Adding to the intricacy is the fact that each interactive element had to be touch compatible as well, so as to be usable on mobile devices. In the end, Tully wrote tens of thousands of lines of code and brought in hundreds of thousands more from open source libraries to create Psychology Beginnings as it is now.

The images used within the modules were also created by Tully. Trent’s subscription to stock image libraries such as Thinkstock gave him access to vector illustrations that he could deconstruct and reassemble as needed. The characters and settings were created in this fashion and arranged on-screen through code. Again, being conscious of various screen sizes, Tully created scalable vector graphics that allow for text and fonts within the images to adjust based on the display size.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes of Psychology Beginnings and those interested in putting the code to use in their own projects are welcome to, provided it is for not commercial purposes and attribution is given to Trent University.