FAQ

General

What is breadboard?

breadboard is a software platform for developing and conducting experiments on networks using online participants.

I am a researcher, what can I use breadboard for?

You can use breadboard to develop human interaction experiments (e.g. public goods games, coordination games), to conduct surveys, or to develop brand-new tasks to test your theories. Once you have developed an experiment you can administer it to subjects in a computer lab, or to online participants gathered through Amazon Mechanical Turk or other sources.

Is breadboard free?

Breadboard can be licensed free of charge for academic and non-profit use. If you are doing research for a for-profit entity and want to use breadboard, please fill out the contact form for more information.

Technical

Why do I get an Oops, cannot start the server... Cannot init the Global object error when I start breadboard?

You need to install version 7 of the Java Development Kit (JDK7), breadboard does not work with JDK8.

To install the JDK7, download the installer from here:

• http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/webnotes/install/mac/mac-jdk.html

If both JDK7 and JDK8 are installed, you can switch to JDK7 with the following command:

• export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home -v 1.7)

When launching breadboard on a Windows PC, I get a Not a valid Play application error.

This is a known issue with the batch file included with breadboard v2.2.3.

To launch breadboard, open a command prompt and run:

java -cp "./lib/*;" play.core.server.NettyServer .

I found a bug! How do I go about reporting the issue?

Please report any issues you find using the GitHub issue tracker here:

• https://github.com/human-nature-lab/breadboard/issues