I actually did a project on something similar in high school. I wrote a little program that would show people two passages in a random order, timing how long it

I actually did a project on something similar in high school. I wrote a little program that would show people two passages in a random order, timing how long it took them to read the passages, alternating between one of four random typefaces. The four faces had two sans-serif faces and two serif faces, but I was interested in a different quality: whether monospace was easier to read. Unfortunately, I ran into serious methodological issues which rendered the data completely inconclusive, but it was a fun experiment nonetheless. The main thing I learned was how awesome computers are at saving me effort: I got all my data in one go while others had to conduct their experiments manually, one-by-one. Even counting how long it took me to hack together the program--and even in high school, using Java Swing, it did not take long--I still won out time-wise. More importantly, I traded boring data gathering for fun programming.