C# is another general-purpose programming language that can be used for building many different types of applications. For psychology researchers, C# can be especially useful for building highly interactive online and offline experiments, in both 2D and 3D. In fact, C# is a big player in the indie video-game market. You could think of psychology experiments as being a lot like games themselves, with participants interacting with elements of your experiment in all kinds of different ways.
The beauty of using C# for building experiments is that you can achieve complex animations and impressive effects more easily compared to other programming languages. The ease with which you can build such experiments (or games) is achieved with a software package called Unity. This is just an environment that makes it much easier to add all the content, features, animations, and effects to your application. You build the visuals of your experiment in the Unity editor and write C# code to add functionality. When you’re done, you can even compile your experiment to work on both desktop and cross-platform mobile which saves you from having to learn how to code for both iPhone and android!
For those of you who are a bit more into the programming side, C# may be interesting to you because of the way it encourages code organisation. C# is typically written in an object-oriented style which some consider to be a more natural way of organising code into discrete entities that represent the way we think about the world.
C# and Unity are free so it’s a great choice if your experiment requires more complex animations. Just be aware that data storage will also need to be handled, so I’d encourage you to check out Firebase for a great database solution.
Click here to start learning C#
Click here to start learning Unity