Programming Skill Assessment for Research Assistants

Mind in Society Lab

Deadline: Wednesday, September 14, 2022, by 11:59 PM ET.

Assessment for TODO: name (TODO: email)

Please make sure you read ALL instructions and complete ALL parts asked of you.

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Overview

Thank you for your interest in the Mind in Society Lab! We are currently recruiting for 1-2 programming focused research assistants who will provide coding/programming support across multiple projects in our lab. After reviewing your application, we believe your skills and interests may be a good fit. We invite you to complete this short assessment so we can learn more about your programming skills.

This assessment reflects some of the foundaitonal programming tasks common across projects in our lab. The goal of the assessment is NOT to examnine your mastery of a certain programming language, but to a) assess your understanding of programming structure regardless of language, and b) allow you to demonstrate your ability to look up + adapt documentations and relevant resources to complete programming tasks.

We are not looking for fancy/elaborate submissions (in fact, this is design to be simple), so please don't spend too much time on the assessment. It should take you about an hour to complete, if not less. Each section will also provide you with some directions or documentations to look towards. If you are uncertain of how to approach certain task, try you best by looking up references and examples to adpot. When you are absolutely unable to complete it, please elaborate on what you've tried in the Google Form submission at the end.

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Packages/Software Needed

You will need the following installed:

• Git + Git Bash (Windows only, Mac should have built-in git inside of terminal)
• Python
• Jupyter Notebook
• matplotlib package

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Instruction

There are 3 parts to this skill assessment:

1. Working with Git & Version Control
2. Programming/Designing a Survey Block
3. Working with the Google Street View API

Part 1's instruction can be found below. Parts 2 & 3's instrction can be found in the README.md file in their respective folders.

Part 1: Working with Git & Version Control

Complete the following to set up your own version of this repository where you can complete Parts 2 & 3.

1. Fork this repository to your personal GitHub account (create an account on Github if you don't have one already).
2. Replace TODO in this README.md file with your full name and email.
3. Clone your forked repo to your local machine.
4. In your local repo, create a (hidden) folder named .secret.
5. Place the keys.json file you received from the invite email into the .secret folder.
6. Create a .gitignore (hidden) file in the repo, and add keys.json to it (make sure you get the relative file path correct).
7. [In general] Commit your changes often. We expect to see a minimum of 3 commits, at least 1 commit per section of this assessment.

Here are some resources to help you with this section:

• Common Git Commands
• Woring with .gitignore

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Submission

Once you've compelted all parts of this assessment, check the following for your forked repo.

• Make sure repo is private.
• Add the user um-misl as a collaborator to your forked repo.
• Make sure you've pushed your local changes upstream.

Submit the skill assessment using this Google Form. It will ask you to submit the URL to your repo. If you are asked to answer any specific questions in your invite email, the Google Form will also have a space for you to add your response.

NOTE: Do not create a pull request from your forked repo.

The deadline to compelte this skill assessment is Wednesday, September 14, 2022, by 11:59 PM ET.