ℹ️ Constructing your first Xblock, a building block of EDIA

🧱 Xblock?

An experiment is defined as a sequence of blocks playing after each other, in EDIA called Xblocks

• A Xblock is a script living on a gameobject in the scene and subscribed to the Edia engine.
• It can be anything, a task, a questionnaire, an information display. That’s up to the developer.
• A Xblock executes it’s logic and gets its settings from the corresponding config file.
• Each Xblock has a corresponding config file.
• An Xblock is identified with <type><subType> combination (e.g., task-attention)
• Variants of the same Xblock are set up using the <type><subType><blockId> combination. (e.g., task-attention-internal vs task-attention-extarnal )
• The experiment sequence of Xblocks is also defined in a config file.

Let’s write our first EDIA task block script.

Setting up the editor

1. To create a new boilerplate task script:

   → Assets/Create/EDIA/XBlockTemplateScript

   • Show

   This adds a new script called NewXBlockTemplate.cs in your Assets folder. It’s good etiquette to move it into your Scripts folder.

2. Rename it to TaskStartersKit (→ Naming conventions )

3. Move the script to the proper folder: Assets/Samples/EDIACore/x.x.x/StartersKit/Getting Started/

4. Doubleclick on the script, it opens in your code editor.

5. ⚠️ A scripts name and its containing MonoBehaviour class name have to be the same. → Rename the class (from XBlockTemplate ) to TaskStartersKit

6. Take a look at the script, it represents a very rudemantary flow of an experiment task.

   • Show visually

Define the goal of our StartersKit task.

As an example task, we want to show a cube to the participant in a certain color. The participant then has to select the color the cube was shown in from a few options shown.

It is good practice to get the task clear before setting up the script, in this case the steps of this task would be:

1. Prepare & show the stimulus (cube)
   1. Pick a color
   2. Assign it to the cube’s material
   3. Show the cube for a certain time
2. User input
   1. Hide the cube
   2. Show selections of colors and a way to select them
   3. Wait on input from participant