Running experiments

This section outlines the steps in running experiments with our platform.

Sandbox experiments

Before spending any money, you should veriy that everything works in the MTurk sandbox.

make sure you are in production mode
See Setup for instructions on how to set up the server and run in production mode.
switch to sandbox mode

Set MTURK_SANDBOX = True in server/config/settings_local.py.

This will use https://workersandbox.mturk.com instead of https://www.mturk.com/.

configure the experiments
For the experiments that you want to run, edit the experiments.py file in those apps (e.g. intrinsic/experiments.py). The most important parameter is auto_add_hits. Set this to True if you want to run this experiment.
start the experiments

The following commands will dispatch tasks to MTurk:

./manage.py mtconfigure
./manage.py mtconsume

See Commands for documentation of these commands.

verify that it works

Navigate to http://workersandbox.mturk.com and find your task on the sandbox marketplace.

Try submitting some results and check that they show up in the admin submission view (http://YOUR_HOSTNAME/mturk/admin/submission/)

expire experiments

To expire all experiments, run:

./manage.py mtexpire '.*'