First-year psychology students at UCL typically took part in experiments as subjects. But as guinea pigs, this meant less time scrutinising data, and more time poring over mechanics.

“We needed to flip the teaching model on its head,” Dan says. “Rather than connecting everything in the final year, we needed to build in research right from the start.”

To close the gap, the department redesigned the first-year syllabus, making students both subject and experimenter.

Instead of basic cubicle exercises, devised by the tutors, students can now carry out their own novel research. This is a huge deal for psychology undergraduates.

"Gorilla has worked out a lot of roadblocks that students face, so students are empowered to overcome them. Gorilla comes with a responsive support team who help students and staff solve any problems they encounter. That really stood out for us in our decision to bring it into the curriculum."

It would have been a real struggle to get a large number of subjects and to get good data before. But over the course of a month and a half, students got well over 100, recruited from all over Europe.

Students on Yale’s computational modelling course needed to design and run real psychological experiments — quickly, independently, and without coding. At the same time, Rutledge’s research required large, diverse samples that in-person labs struggled to reach, particularly participants with anxiety or depression.

"When you have a new idea, you can put something together [in Gorilla] and have results in a matter of days."

Rutledge integrated Gorilla into his course enabling students to build and run their own experiments online within a week. The approach gave students hands-on research experience while allowing rapid data collection from broad, real-world samples — all without the technical barriers of traditional lab software.