This software package has been developed for the Communication Research Center at Boston University, and consists of two psychometric tests. These tests can be administered through a web interface and measure aspects of multitasking perfomance, including speed, accuracy, and task switching cost. The project is intended to recreate the tasks from this interactive demonstration developed by the New York Times. Given that many modern web browsers no longer support Flash, the project is written in Dart using Flutter.
- Fork the repository and clone it to your local machine
- Follow the instructions here to install the Flutter SDK
- Follow the instructions here to install required Firebase tools
- Setup Android Studio or Visual Studio Code
To run a version of the package for local testing, run the following command from the project root:
flutter run -d chrome
Flutter supports hot and cold restarts after changes to the project, with the following commands:
- Cold restart:
r - Hot restart:
shift + r
You can build the project for web as follows:
flutter build web
The app can be deployed to Firebase for hosting and data storage.
Once deployed, the test and export interfaces can be accessed from the following routes relative to the Firebase project URL:
| Route | Description |
|---|---|
| /#/multitask | Task Switching Test |
| /#/testfocus | Focus Test |
| /#/export | Data Export |
The results of both tests are stored in Firestore. Whenever a test is completed, the most recent study data in the project database is also automatically exported to a CSV file stored in the /reports/ folder of the Firebase project. (Note: Automatic exports can be resource intensive with large samples. If you expect to run tests frequently, it may be more economical to disable the automatic export functions and use legacy manual reporting functions.)
This project is led by Dr. James Cummings, Division of Emerging Media Studies, Boston University. The package was initially developed by Beck and this fork was modified by Tiernan Cahill.
This project is released under the MIT License.