Open Psychology Interactives Free teaching tools for psychology

Free, open, classroom-ready

Interactive teaching tools for psychology

150 activities that let students predict, change something and watch what follows, across five modules of the psychology degree. Find one in seconds, read how to run it, or combine a few with your own questions into one link for students. Everything runs in the browser, on a phone or a lecture-theatre projector, with no account and nothing recorded.

Find an activity Build a lesson Browse the modules

Five modules

Each module groups tools around the ideas students find hardest to picture. All five are complete, and every tool has a shorter Simplified Edition twin.

  • Module 01

    Cognitive Psychology

    Selective attention, working memory, reconstructive memory, perception as inference and judgement under uncertainty — the processes students are usually asked to take on trust.

    12 tools available

  • Module 02

    Research Methods

    Sampling variation, confidence intervals, p-values, correlation and power — the design and inference ideas students usually meet as formulae before they meet them as intuitions.

    21 tools available

  • Module 03

    Neuropsychology

    Attention, memory and executive function paradigms, plus the logic of dissociations — so students can run the task before they read about the finding.

    12 tools available

  • Module 05

    Personality and Individual Differences

    Trait structure, factor analysis, reliability and validity, and how to read a profile — the measurement reasoning behind individual differences research.

    18 tools available

75 tools, each at two lengths

Every topic exists as a full-length tool (15 to 30 minutes, for a lab or independent study) and as a Simplified Edition twin (5 to 7 minutes, for a lecture slot or revision). The library searches both at once and shows the teaching notes for each; the module pages below list the full-length tools in teaching order.

If you would like to write the next one, the contributing guide explains how. Read the contributing guide

There is also a Simplified Edition

Every one of the 75 tools above has a shorter twin. A simplified activity runs about three to seven minutes rather than fifteen to thirty, and teaches one thing rather than five. The working part is the same: the simulation is still a simulation and the model is still yours to change. What was cut is the number of ideas being taught at once, the repeated cases, and the challenge and transfer tasks at the end.

Use the simplified version for a ten-minute slot in a lecture, a warm-up before the full activity, or a revision pass. Use the full version for a lab session or independent study. Each simplified activity links to the full-length one it came from.

Open the Simplified Edition

Why this project exists

Several ideas in an undergraduate psychology degree are far easier to see than to be told. What a sampling distribution does when you change n. Why an unreliable measure caps the correlation you can observe. What a Stroop trial actually feels like. Static slides describe these things; an interactive lets a student predict, change one thing at a time, and watch what follows.

Good teaching interactives do exist, but they tend to be locked inside a publisher's platform, tied to one textbook, dependent on a login, or built on software that stops working after a few years. This project takes the opposite position. Every tool here is a plain web page: no accounts, no tracking, no server, no build step, nothing to install. Download the folder and it still works in ten years.

It is aimed at anyone teaching psychology at university level — lecturers and seminar leaders looking for something to demonstrate live, teaching assistants preparing a lab session, and students who want to work through an idea on their own.

How these are meant to be used

The tools are built for these settings. None of them requires students to create an account or install anything.

  1. A lesson with one link

    Put two or three activities in order, add what students should do and the questions you want answered, and hand them one link. The lesson travels inside the link, so there is nothing to sign up for and nothing stored anywhere. Build a lesson, or start from a ready-made one: Stroop, from the front (lecture), What a p-value is not (seminar) or What a score can carry (revision).

  2. Live demonstration

    Open a tool on the lecture-theatre display and change one parameter while talking. The layout stays readable when projected and when zoomed for a large room.

  3. Guided lab or seminar

    Students work through a tool on their own devices while you pose questions. Every tool's teaching notes, with prompts and the misconceptions it is designed to surface, are on its library page.

  4. Independent revision

    Link a tool from your VLE and students can return to it whenever they like. There is no login, so a link is all they need.

  5. Adapted for your own course

    Copy a tool's folder, change the defaults, the wording or the worked example, and host your version anywhere. The adaptation guide walks through it.

Documentation

Written for teaching staff and for contributors. These are Markdown files in the repository, so they open on GitHub where they are rendered properly.

  • Teaching guide

    Using the tools in lectures, labs and independent study, with guidance on framing, timing and the misconceptions each module targets.

  • Accessibility

    The WCAG 2.2 AA standard every tool here is held to, how it is tested, and what to do if you meet a barrier while teaching.

  • Adapting a tool

    How to copy a tool, change it for your own course and host your version — including the shared shell's markup contract.

Reuse and licensing

Everything in this repository is released under the MIT licence. In practical teaching terms that means you may use these tools in your own classes, put them on your own website or VLE, change the wording, the defaults or the design, and build something new on top of them — commercially or otherwise — without asking permission and without paying anything.

The one condition is attribution: keep the copyright notice and licence text with any substantial portion you reuse. A credit line such as “Adapted from Open Psychology Interactives” with a link back is welcome but is not legally required beyond that notice.

There are no photographs, stock images, fonts or third-party libraries bundled here, so nothing carries a separate licence you would need to check before reusing it.