I found both programs to be very user friendly and easy to learn. The instruction manuals for both programs were very well written and easy to follow. The examples were helpful to see what the end result would look like, as well as to use for practice in learning the programs. To be honest, I was a little worried when my supervisor asked me to learn the programs, as I did not really have a lot of programming experience. Once I started reading the manuals and trying things out for myself, my worries subsided. And when I needed help with something that I could not figure out myself, Blair Jarvis himself was very helpful. He was very patient with me an explained things very clearly and was able to help me solve any problems, just from my descriptions of what was not working. These were usually little things I had forgotten to do, and so a little reminder was sometimes all that was needed. As well, the fact that the input files are created in Excel was helpful, since I am familiar with that program. This also made making changes to the experiment easy. Many of the subjects commented on the fact that the experiment looked nice, since were able to create instruction screens using PowerPoint (which allowed us to incorporate all of the capabilities of PowerPoint as well). Finally, the data merging capability of the programs is wonderful, as it saves a lot of time for the experimenter. In summary, I would definitely recommend the programs to others and feel that they make programming experiments an easy and fun experience (even for those of us who have not done any programming previously).

Shilaja Sundaramoorthy,
University of Toronto