The intention was to enable leading academics to harness the BBC's audience, using mass public participation to explore scientific hypotheses with very large data sets.
Scientists such as Dr. Val Curtis and Dr. Stian Reimers asked whether they might analyse the anonymous data generated by the completion of these online quizzes.
BBC's Multiplatform commissioners decided to make a re-usable experiment publication platform that could save all data to a common database.
A collaboration with the Medical Research Council, Cambridge University, King's College London, the Alzheimer's Society and the BBC One Television programme, Bang Goes The Theory - this longitudinal experiment, launched in September 2009, sought to discover whether brain training games made any improvement to IQ for a healthy, general population.
[6] The Lab UK website hosted a series of brain training games and the study was structured as a clinical randomised controlled trial.
The study designers, Dr Adrian Owen and Professor Clive Ballard analysed the data and concluded the games made no difference to a healthy adult population.
The stated ambition was to create a new snapshot of British society and develop some newer, more relevant class labels for the 21st century.
(also see 'The Great British Class Survey') Collaborating with BBC One's consumer programme Watchdog, this experiment aimed to discover the psychological traits that led to money problems in a large general population.
It was launched in April 2011 by Watchdog's finance presenter, Martin Lewis, who featured in the interactive video feedback.
The experiment contained various verified measures and a selection of interactive puzzles which tested various aspects of risk judgement.
[13] This updated version of the earlier experiment presented more comprehensive feedback and was re-launched by Claudia Hammond on BBC Radio 4's 'All in the Mind' in June 2011.
The survey contained detailed demographic information and 33 'vignettes' which attempted to test people's responses to immoral behaviour across different moral domains.
The experiment aimed to test how effective 4 different sports psychology techniques were compared to a control in improving performance at a simple number grid task.
[17] The test provided randomised psychological interventions to participants via video clips from Olympic sprinter, Michael Johnson.
Part of the interactive video feedback by Johnson was the first item to be filmed at Lund Point, the decommissioned block of flats in Stratford that was to become BBC TV's Olympic HQ.
[22] The first peer-reviewed paper published based on these data, concerned the psychological aspects of childhood sexual abuse survivors.
[23] A study has been published examining the geographical associations between personality and life satisfaction using over 50,000 cases from residents of London.
The authors found money attitudes (money as power, security, generosity or autonomy) and financial capabilities (making ends meet, keeping track, planning ahead, and staying informed) to be significant predictors of experiencing adverse financial events ranging from denial of credit to bankruptcy).
The calculator is a web application that asks seven questions from the original survey, and categorises each person into the newly found class categories, depending on their results.
BBC ID was employed as a sign-ed service was needed to help keep participant's data secure, and to prevent malicious submissions.
Senior management decided in 2013 that all technical effort would now be spent building this product rather than supporting the Lab UK service.
Learnings from the Lab UK project were used during the development of the Open University's citizen science platform nQuire, which was built in partnership with the BBC.