The first spin off from the SciPilot launch pad was Motif – an online test interface for language impairment studies. This was the brainchild of Dr. Genevieve McArthur and Prof. Anne Castles from the school of MACCS at the Macquarie University, Sydney with a little help from myself to turn it into a web-application. I saw the web as a massive opportunity to distribute this free tool to a much larger audience, helping teachers and parents evaluate their kids and also potentially enabling MACCS run broader studies online. The previous tests were run on paper, PDFs and CDRoms with a mixture of issues, including borrowed laptops returning with kids’ pens jammed into them.<\/p>\n
You can check out the site here at www.motif.org.au<\/a>, but to see the tests, you have to pass some fairly rigorous approval processes! The site is intended for a serious research audience only. We are now planning to add more tests to the site, so it could become a serious tool in this area of research.<\/p>\n Technically speaking, I built the site with CodeIgniter<\/a>, finally giving myself a chance to build a pure MVC application. I implemented the models with Deepend<\/a>‘s CMS which provides an easy way to create\u00a0 the administration functions, plus generating the models automatically. It was also my first experiment with Blueprint CSS<\/a> to lay out the module grid which was very easy – after I’d spent a few weeks fighting with my own layout scheme. I hate browsers, I don’t have time for their quirks, give me a deterministic back end any day! I also used JQuery<\/a> for most of the front-end interactive code, including the great form validation plugin – what a time saver! As I’ve often found JQuery combinations can lead to difficulties – I did have some trouble with using ReCaptcha <\/a>and JQuery together, but it turned out to be the curvycorners plugin alone, so disabling corners in the user area was an honest repair. Oh, for -moz-border-radius in IE!<\/p>\n So at least I can say I finished one thing this year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The first spin off from the SciPilot launch pad was Motif – an online test interface for language impairment studies. This was the brainchild of Dr. Genevieve McArthur and Prof. Anne Castles from the school of MACCS at the Macquarie … Continue reading