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Run Otree in a in-person Lab

#1 by mohamadre3a

Hello everyone,

I have a question regarding my experiment setup. It’s hosted on Heroku, and I’m planning to run it in an in-person lab with students. My concern is that I don’t want anyone outside of this lab, including students who aren’t there, to access the experiment and complete it.

I thought about creating unique usernames and passwords for each participant and handing them out in the lab, but I’m not sure if that’s the best or most convenient option. 

What are some possible solutions?

#2 by ccrabbe

Hi mohamadre3a - 

oTree's solution to this problem is configuring a room *with participant labels* and then either having the students enter a participant label upon starting (which is checked against this configured list) or distributing links in the lab which already contain the participant label.

https://otree.readthedocs.io/en/latest/rooms.html?highlight=rooms#participant-labels

If you set the participant labels to be random alphanumeric strings, for example, nobody outside the lab will be able to guess.

Thanks,
--Chris

#3 by BonnEconLab (edited )

We frequently use oTree for in-person experiments at the BonnEconLab.

We use oTree rooms for this purpose in combination with participant labels, just like @ccrabbe already suggested.

More precisely, what we usually do is the following:

1. We wait for participants to arrive.

2. Only then do we open the room with the very number of participants present.
– This way, we avoid that there are any missing participants whom we would have to advance manually.
– Opening the room just in time makes it highly unlikely that any unauthorized person could access your experiment.
– In addition, you could choose a name for the room that is very difficult to guess (similar to @ccrabbe’s suggestion of using “random alphanumeric strings” for the participant labels).

3. The participant labels that we use reflect the cubicle numbers in our lab.
– This way, it is easy to associate, for instance, the payment that a participant is supposed to receive with the cubicle number.

4. After opening the room, we go from PC to PC according to the cubicle numbers and open the oTree URL one by one.
– This has the desirable effect that the listings of the connected clients in oTree’s “Monitor,” “Data,” and “Payment” tabs are sorted by the cubicle number.
– Once all participants in the lab have completed the experiment, no one can access your experiment anymore (even if you leave the room open).

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