DMC

Destination Medical Center

While doing our Destination Medical Center project we learned what it was, and what it's goals were. We then presented this information to our class. During research my group found a possible future issue with Education in the area. Our problem was how the DMC initiative would affect the educational system in Rochester and the surrounding area. When researching for information on projected growth in college graduates we contacted multiple schools in the area. The majority of our data came from Universities, but some came from Technical colleges as well. This created diversity and understanding throughout the ranks in the local educational system.

What did I learn from this project? Well, first of all I learned to work with a group that I had never really worked with before which was nice. I also learned to be more outgoing and assertive. Mainly because I had to call all of the school and speak to the representatives. However, there were also many things I learned about stats. I learned that there is more to statistics than just numbers. The process includes a lot of planning and presenting as well as decimals and percents.

Something I took away from this project is how quickly DMC is going to happen. I knew that it was in the process and that we were going to experience it in our lifetime. However, I never imagined that it would take place so quick and complete itself in a short amount of time. It will be exciting to see where this project takes Rochester and the surrounding area's in the next 10-20 years.

The Project I Chose: DMC Project

     I chose this project because it was the most recent.  I have the most information on it compared to the others. This project each group picked a section about the DMC to talk about and find information about the basic needs of the community around the DMC.  Like the need for money, water, food and shelter.  One of the bigger factors to help people meet these needs is what job the person has.  They need to make enough money to support themselves and their families. The graph below show how much people work in each wage category out of the top 200 jobs.  Most of the jobs are low wage jobs.  I would assume it would be hard to support yourself and your family with a job where you make less than maybe $20/hour if you have a family. The other graph shows the percentages and it shows they are trying to increase the higher paying jobs at a higher rate.  This I think is a good baseline of making the community a more comfortable place to live.

GapMinder Project

The GapMinder project was one of the best projects of this quarter. We learned how to identify the difference between causation and correlation. We also learned more about the countries that were outliers and why they were so high or low. There was also countries that moves horizontally more than up or down. 

For this project we were asked to make a video on Gapminder. We were to take data from the website and make a story from that data. We looked at the difference of the average income and Body Mass Index. On Gapminder there was countries like China or India that had average incomes but where pretty low on BMI. There were also small countries that stood out like Nauru that had a average income but a really high BMI compared to everyone else and the highest of all the countries we looked at. 

This project was good to identify causation vs. correlation. I was able to figure out how to use the Gapminder site and find if the two variables were caused by each other. Overall this project was good and helped us learn in a more creative way. 

  

Overall I think that the Infographic project was my favorite. It was my favorite becasue this is when I really learned how to work and communicate with other people besides doing work by myself. We asked many students a number of questions and based on the answers we were able to make statisitcally relevant data. Then we placed them into a single page and made it as appealing and easy to read as possible.

I think that the biggest and most important thing I learned isn't necessarily the stats part but working together in a group to accomplish a goal. This type of work has many life benefits. You will more likley considered to a job if you have good people skills and are to cooperate well within a group. I also liked it becasue my group members were the ones who how to score my performance not the teacher all the time.

The one thing I’m going to admit is that this was very fun. I know that math can be a bit much sometimes, and its very complicated in some sorts. But this was a very fun project. From asking my peers questions, to analyizng the data and putting them into easy, and understandable ways.

GapMinder Project

The project I enjoyed working on the most was GapMinder. During this project I learned how to look at data and make a hypothesis about the data trend, and determine if the data was correlation or causation. This project made me look deeper into data that is put out in front of you and see what information you can take out.

In my group's project we compared average income to body mass index (BMI) in men. When we looked at the data we investigated a few countries to see what made them an outlier. For example Nauru was a small country that had few people but most of them were overweight causing them to be extremely far away on the graph than other countries with similar income. In our conclusion we found that there was a direct correlation between the average income per person and BMI in men.

Overall this project has helped me understand that graphs can present information that may look like it has a significance but there could be more variables that play a role in the data shown. One way this is shown is by comparing BMI to life expectancy. It shows a similar trend to BMI and income. The life expectancy is higher because the hidden variable is income. We think that the higher income usually means more food is available to eat, but they also have better health care so people live longer even though they have a higher BMI.

Quarter 4 Blog

DMC PROJECT

The DMC project was an overview of what the DMC is and what problems it will bring to Rochester and the surrounding communities. We researched a problem the DMC would bring and thought of our own solutions for it. Our groups problem was education. We focused on Byron public schools but it was lafter brought to our attention this would happen to other surrounding areas also.  When we were finished with our project we had to present it to a group who was in the process of planning the actual DMC project.

We started this project by getting information from Jennifer Walsch in the district office. We obtained data about past, present and future enrollment for the Byron schools. The information we got was before the DMC plan was announced so we had to do more research on growth with DMC. We also had to take this information and make is visual by creating graphs and making a presentation of our information. Finally we presented our projects to a small group of officials who working on planning the real DMC project.

After we presented, the guests watching our presentations gave us feedback. The questions and feedback they gave us helped us think deeper into the problem. We had to come up with solutions to this problem and they were surprised with some of the options we had because they hadn't thought about them. This project helped us learn about what was going on in our community and how to apply it to school. I thought it was very beneficial because we are learning about statistics and how to apply them to a real world example and problem.

Evan V -- Ultimate Frisbee Project

Through the second quarter I had even more fun than I did in the first quarter as far as projects go.  I go to do the Minute to Win it project and the Moneyball project which were both very entertaining.  The Minute to Win it one was fun.  Going through all the experiments and having people try them was very fun.  Some people struggled and that was fun to watch.  However my favorite project of the quarter was the Moneyball project.  My team did not fare very well in the draft but the overall concept was a lot of fun.  I love the movie and story Moneyball, and am all about sports.  I follow the NFL draft a lot and so this was fun for me to analyze different prospects.  This project was unlike many that I've done in high school, in a good way,  I had a lot of fun with it and loved the real world application.

The image above is our spreadsheet from our project.  We had to make our own stat and with that we were able to sort players by overall.  First we made Defensive Overall where we added defense short thrown at and defense long thrown at. This you want a very low number because it will mean you are not thrown at often because you are that dominant. Next we made Offensive overall where we added short catches and long catches. This you want a very big number. We subtracted defensive from offensive to get your overall where you want as big of a number as possible. That number is your player overall which we then ranked our players by it.  Our stat failed horribly however!! We made a few big errors with it including highlighting the wrong row in our spreadsheet.  This was not smart of us, and lead to us failing horribly.  Along with this we were later advised that we should've used percentages instead of raw data.

Even though we did not fare well with the results of the project the idea of it and everything leading up to it was very fun.

Overall the class was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the freedom that came with it being an online class.  I would recommend everyone to take this class and would especially encourage them to do it online.  Not that I don't like you Mr. P ;) but the way I learned this quarter was much different than in the past and I think that has helped me become a better student.

Ultimate Frisbee/Moneyball Project

For our ultimate Frisbee project, we had to draft teams from a set of players to try and win a tournament. We were given an excel spreadsheet with all of the different players and their stats. The stats included catch rations, block ratios, and successful throw ratios for both short and long passes. There wasn’t much direction on what to do with this data aside from to draft a team and I feel that this was what made the project a really good learning experience. Every person did it differently forcing them to come up with different questions and teaching everyone more about statistics as a whole rather than just a certain aspect of it.

Eli's stats (our fist pick)

short catch %	long catch%	failblock short %	failblock long %	short throw %	Long throw %
0.911	0.448	0.709	0.219	0.783	0.363

z score short catch	z score long catch	z score failblock short	z score failblock long	short throw z	long throw z
2.630	1.615	0.751	-1.896	0.925	0.910

My team based our draft on the combination of short catch and short throw ability. We did this by finding the z-scores for every player in these, and all the other, areas and then averaging them out. In this way, the people who were best at both ended up on top and we had a team which could reliably throw and catch short. We chose to do this strategy because I actually convinced Mr. Pethan to let me mess with the Frisbee simulation program and figured out what really mattered in the games. If I hadn’t been able to get the program, my team would likely have tried to incorporate some short blocking, but I found that to be unimportant.

I learned quite a few thing from this project that I believe will help me later on. I learned how to format spreadsheets correctly, calculate z scores in spreadsheets, apply statistics to sports, and I even learned a little bit about programming along the way. I feel that this is a fun and incredibly useful project since it teaches everyone about a slightly different way to interpret statistics and numbers. It is also useful because using excel for things like this is not something everyone knew how to do and it is a useful skill.

DMC

For the DMC project we basically explained what it is and what its objectives are.  We researched what their intentions were  and found a projected problem with the growth of population. Our problem was the overpopulation of the school districts surrounding the Rochester area. Our group focused more on Byron's growth, but we believe this same pattern will happen in the other towns too. We got most of our information from Jen Walsh from the district business office to get the data of the school's projected enrollment and the capacity of each school.

What I learned from this project was to come up with ideas and plan for them right away.  It wasn't a good situation when we only had a couple days left until we presented and still had basically nothing done.  I think we pulled through and put it all together rather fast and had a nice final project but I think it would've felt easier to present if we had started it earlier.

Something I took away from learning about the DMC initiative is that our surrounding area will go through drastic changes in the next 20 years. Before doing this project, I had no idea what the DMC was and what was happening; all I knew of was that Mayo Clinic was adding on a new building for more research and more labs but I didn't know this crazy project was happening.

Quarter 4 Blog Post

The Minute to Win it Project was my favorite.  With this project, we did an experiment that looked at how long it would take people to make a paper airplane, and throw it into a recycling bin.  We measured out a 3 foot distance and a 5 foot distance.  With this, we found that people made it from the 3 foot mark quicker than they did from the 5 foot mark.  This confirmed our null hypothesis of exactly that.  We also did an observational study during this project to see if our subjects cared or not, and how that affected their throwing time.  The people that, in our opinion, cared completed the challenge quicker than those who did not.

With this project, we learned how to properly set up an experiment.  This includes how to set people up into matched paired treatment groups.  This was easy to do because we had the same person perform the task at both distances.  To make sure we kept it a reasonable experiment, we randomly assigned each person a starting point.  Another thing we learned was how to take the data we found and analyse it.  This was useful in explaining our data and showing whether or not it held statistical evidence.  This helped us to better understand what we had found and helped us draw conclusions about our experiment and observation.  We also learned how to write a group statistic paper.  Not only are these papers different than a normal paper that you write in English class, but we also had to do them in groups.  This caused some trouble right away, but eventually, we figured out how to divide the work and get the paper done.

Project Link