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Using the static site

To use the static website in your research, you will direct participants to the assessment you want them to take.

Specifying the assessment​

Directly visiting the static site main web page shows nothing because the entry web page is expecting a URL parameter to tell it what assessment to run. Remember, a m2c2kit static site can host many assessments and many versions of those assessments.

🌐 What is a URL parameter?

A URL specifies the location of a resource on the internet.

URL parameters are additional information passed to the webpage. They are appended to the end of the URL, after a ?. Multiple parameters can be used by separating them with &.

For example, to set parameters called name and school, the URL would be: http://www.example.com?name=m2c2kit&school=PennState

What if you want to set a parameter to a value that includes spaces, or even a & or = character? To do that, you must encode the value (sometimes called URL-encoding, URI-encoding, or percent encoding).

For example, to set the parameter school to franklin & marshall, we would pass in the URL-encoded value, which is franklin%20%26%20marshall. The URL would be http://www.example.com?name=m2c2kit&school=franklin%20%26%20marshall

To run a particular assessment, set the URL parameter called assessment to the package name and version of an assessment you specified in the site configuration.

For example, consider a configuration file that looked like this:

assessments: [
  {
    name: "@m2c2kit/assessment-symbol-search",
    versions: ">=0.8.19",
  },
  {
    name: "@m2c2kit/assessment-grid-memory",
    versions: ">=0.8.19"
  }
]

To run version 0.8.19 of Symbol Search, the browser address would be:

  • http://127.0.0.1:8080/index.html?assessment=@m2c2kit/assessment-symbol-search@0.8.19

To run version 0.8.19 of Grid Memory, the browser address would be:

  • http://127.0.0.1:8080/index.html?assessment=@m2c2kit/assessment-grid-memory@0.8.19
tip

Still confused? If you get a blank page, open the developer console. There will be some helpful messages about what assessments are in the static site and how to run them.

Use cases​

A URL with the appropriate assessment parameter is how you will direct participants to specific assessments, such as:

  • Participants complete a survey in Qualtrics or RedCap, and then you direct them to a m2c2kit assessment on the static site.
  • In an ecological momentary assessment (EMA) approach, you send participants text messages at carefully chosen times. The messages contain a URL to a m2c2kit assessment on the static site.

Individual-level parameter customization​

In the site configuration, the parameters property allowed customization of assessment parameters. However, you may want parameters customizations specific to a group of participants or a single participant.

If assessment parameters are added to the URL, it will override the parameters that were set in the site configuration.

Imagine we had two groups of participants. Group A has an abbreviated protocol (only 6 trials). Group B has the full protocol (12 trials). You could send the following URLs:

  • Group A receives http://127.0.0.1:8080/index.html?assessment=@m2c2kit/assessment-symbol-search@0.8.19&number_of_trials=6
  • Group B receives http://127.0.0.1:8080/index.html?assessment=@m2c2kit/assessment-symbol-search@0.8.19&number_of_trials=12

(of course, in a real study, the static site would not be running on your local machine at http://127.0.0.1:8080, but you get the idea!)