Virtual Hackathon 2025

Overview

We're excited to announce our second hackathon dedicated to extending the jsPsych ecosystem! This two-week event will provide hands on training in contributing to open source software and building custom plugins for jsPsych.

Participants will work in small teams to develop new plugins, extensions, or timelines with guidance from the jsPsych development team. A new plugin can make a new type of trial available for researchers, like a drag and drop word bank. A new extension can add new functionality across multiple trials and even additional data types, like eye tracking or fitbit metrics. A new timeline is a way to share a parameterized version of an entire task. For example, a Stroop task with customizable words, colors, stimulus timing, and responses.

We will also offer hands-on support for building experiments, and help teams think about how to convert experiments into shareable, parameterized timelines.

Event Details

Start Date: September 29th, 2025

End Date: October 11th, 2025

Where: Hosted virtually on Discord and Zoom

Target Audience

This event is aimed at researchers who have experience with using jsPsych for building experiments. We won't be teaching the basics of how to use jsPsych at this event. Instead, we will be focusing on how to develop and extend jsPsych itself. If you're interested in learning how to build your own plugins, or you want to learn how to contribute your work to the jsPsych ecosystem, this event is for you!

This is also an especially accessible opportunity for anyone who would otherwise be unable to travel for an in-person event.

What We Offer

Developer Guidance: Workshops and live support from the team that built jsPsych, with flexible options for participants to get synchronous or asynchronous feedback to suit their timezone.

Collaborative Learning: Working to build your own plugins or modifications with a small team, dedicated project channels, and peer feedback.

Project Showcases: Platforms to document and share your work with our community, and even contribute back to our public repositories.

How to Participate

1. Sign up through our interest form: Let us know who you are, your home institution, and what kind of plugin you would like to contribute to jsPsych.
2. Accept the invite to our Discord server: Our team will follow up with this invitation after you submit your form. We'll be hosting all collaboration, workshops, and feedback on our server.
3. Review our server guide, schedule, and documentation: Once you're clear on how to navigate our server's channel, be sure to check our schedule to know when our live sessions and drop-in hours are happening. We will also provide step-by-step documentation for how to painlessly set up your development space.
4. Brainstorm your plugin: Meet your peers in our project-brainstorming channel and flesh out each others' plugin ideas.
5. Choose a project to join and meet your teammates: Once you're ready to commit to a project, just fill in a form that will go live in the server's announcements channel. We'll assign you the role you need to access your team's private collaboration channels. Then you can meet your teammates and start building!