0 · Before you start

About 15 minutes, longer if you need to install Python and uv

Mary Whiton Calkins built one of the first psychology laboratories in the United States, at Wellesley in the 1890s. She went on to become the first woman president of the American Psychological Association in 1905. Harvard refused her the PhD she had earned.
Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

For this tutorial it will help if you have some experience with Python and preferably (but not necessarily) have played with jsPsych before. You don't need to have any prior experience with Django.

What you need installed

• Python 3.14 and uv for managing the environment and dependencies. If you haven't come across uv, it's a fast, modern replacement for pip and venv. I was hesitant to start using it but haven't looked back since
• A code editor. I love PyCharm, which is developed by JetBrains, a software company founded in Prague (the professional version is free for academics). Microsoft's free alternative is Visual Studio Code (guide to setting it up for Django)
• A terminal 🖥️ (how to open one)

In the next chapters we get the project running and a study showing in the browser.