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

                

                

                                                              

Gap Minder

            The gap minder project was my favorite project because I learned how trends can be observed. For my project I compared alcohol consumption with fertility. I was surprised to see how different countries usually each have their own range of alcohol consumption which is linked to the number of children each woman has. There are other things that can affect these results such as poverty, disease, and how many kids the woman wants.

           Also, this project allowed me to see how outliers occur, and that not everyone will fall within the trend. One reason that there maybe wasn't much information in years previous to 2008 might be because no one studied the affects of alcohol prior to this time. The most interesting thing to me was I didn't realize that alcohol consumption can affect fertility. I thought it only affected a baby once it had been conceived. Overall, I really liked this project because it has more meaning than just some random statistics.

Infographic Poster

My favorite project that we did was the infograph because it was our first project that we did and it helped us better understand ways to find good data and how to communicate our results. I think that the most difficult part that I wasn't expecting was gathering the data on our own time. I think that it could change to us going into classrooms and asking for their participation in our survey. It was hard to do it on our own time if we have to go to work after school and aren't in a sport. We can do it during lunch but then it seems repetitive with other infographs because we all have the same population.

It was enjoyable that we had enough time in class to work on the graphs with our groups, however, whenever we take quizzes during our work time it became hard for us to work as a group because at least 1 person had to retake a quiz every time so not everyone would work on the graph. I learned more about how to work as a group and how to finish things efficiently. I also think that it helps us to know the skills better.

School Infographic

This quarter my favorite assignment that I worked on was the infographic project.

To gather information for the project we did a stratified random sample of juniors and seniors at Byron High school. We gave each person on our list a survey that included questions such as "How much do you like hybrid classes" and "Do you like or dislike the cafeteria food?" We then took the information we received from the forty different responders and used them to make graphs and charts. 

It was fun to be able to learn how other students feel about our school. I also liked turning our information into pretty charts. They are much better to look at and a whole lot easier to understand and interpret. My group was able to get feedback a lot on how our graphs could be better. It was easy to learn because we were constantly getting help when we needed it. In the end I believe that all the revision was worth it because I am proud of the work we produced. For future students I would say to not worry so much about the first ones being perfect, they will get better and easier as you go.

It was also cool to learn more of the practical application of things, such as margins of error, to real-life information. Our margins of error were so huge because our sample sizes were relatively small. We could improve it by asking more students, selected by an SRS, the same questions. I like being able to learn with actual data and data that I have found myself so this was perfect for that. 

What worked really well for our group was that Emily and I got the seniors and a couple juniors and Ryan asked the juniors. The biggest improvement that we made was picking graphs that matched the type of information that we were trying to convey. I think that the feedback activity was helpful because we could see what we did and didn't want.

Some things that I learned during this unit are the margin of error and how to find it, what makes a graph look better and more appealing, and how to get people to take my survey. I also learned more about group work even though ours didn't run smoothly. Some of the specific skills do seem useful because I will be needing them in college. The project overall was useful too. I think that they tied together nicely.

Favorite Stats Project

Infographic Project

Before this quarter even started I heard a lot of rumors about this class. Most of the rumors were good. I heard that this stats class has a lot of projects and it is mostly an independent class. Going into this class I was not quite sure I would like it because I learn better with lectures and taking notes. As this quarter went on, I realized that these projects we are doing are actually teaching me a lot. It is nice to have a hands on type of class and be able to work at our own pace for the most part, but still learn. The first project we did in this class was the infographic project. The project gave me a basic understanding on how to ask questions, make people answer the questions, and also find the margin of error. Basically, this project was a good project to start out with because it gave a good introduction to what we would learn throughout the rest of the quarter. 

At the end of this quarter, I decided that my favorite project that I did was the Infographic project. It was my favorite project because we had a lot of fun creating the theme and searching for people to take our survey. For the Infographic project, my group and I decided we would do a movies theme. My group figured out a way to have graphs that look like film, popcorn, and so much more! I also enjoyed the fact that we were given the time to play around on piktochart. The time given to us allowed us to have the best project we could do at the time.  

To begin this project, we came up with 6 questions to ask. Then we chose our population. Our population was students at Byron High School. We did a simple random sample and chose 10 students from each grade. The questions were simply about movies. For an example, we asked a question about what your favorite snack was while at the movies. The results showed that 54% of high school students at Byron decided they like to eat popcorn while watching a movie. This was kind of surprising to me because I though more would like to eat popcorn. 

I guess I could say, my favorite part of this project was making the design on piktochart! 

Sarah's Infographic Project

During my first quarter of Mr. Pethan's Statistics class, I enjoyed many things. The project that comes to mind when I think of the most fun is the Infographic project. This project was the most enjoyable because it was very open to interpretation. We were able to survey whatever population we desired, and present that information in an original way.

Our survey was purposed to find out more about the Junior class at Byron High School. We had ran a simple random sample (SRS) survey for 30 people and received 28 responses.

Quarter 1: Favorite Project

Info Graphic 

"Could you please take my survey?" For my info graphic project I was partners with Sarah and Andrew. We decided that for our info graphic our population would be the junior class. We asked juniors about their home lives, things like "do you have pets" and "if so how many", "do you have a job" and "if so, where". A survey needed to be put together, so we made a simple survey on  the questions we wanted to ask. After this was complete, we used a simple random sample to find the people to survey; by using the class list we generated randoms numbers and found the person it matched with. Asking people was the hardest part because some people were impossible to find, some were sick and some were on vacation. After we got all the data, we made graphs pertaining to the information gathered. We made our info graphic very simple and easy to read with good graphs.


By doing the info graphic project I learned a lot. I learned simple things like how to make good graphs and how to organize the graphs for the most impact. Making the poster simple to read and easy flowing was another thing that took time. We wanted to make it visually appealing. Not only did I learn the simple things that will help with other classes, but I learned a lot about how to take what we were learning and apply it. By doing this I got to see the steps to making a good survey and how hard it is to find good information.

Overall, this was my favorite project because by applying what we were learning helped me learn it better. Even though it was hard to find some of the people and this made it challenging. It made me realize that this is what real statisticians have to deal with and make a solution to the little problems that come up in their projects. This was the best project out of the quarter because it was fun and we did learn something. This project made me realize that the little details do matter because they can wreck or make the project. By organizing the project like we did made it so much better. It made it easier to read and flowed well.

Andrew Duit's Stats Mid Semester Post

What we had to do for this project is to create a survey using Google docs and then create and Infographic displaying the information that we had taken. We did an SRS which is a simple random sampling, which was a method on how to acquire good data and not an easy or convince sample. 

My group had done a survey on Prom. On who was going and what exactly they spent each time they went for the Sophomores, Junior and the Senior classes only at Byron Senior High School. What I learned from all of this is that we had to get random data in order for it to be even considered being valid data (all data is valid, just whether or not its the right kind of data you want.) We came up with a method on how to acquire these people we waned to have take our survey. We had a list and we needed at least twenty people from the three grades, so what we did is take the number of people in the grade and get twenty people out of it. We would get every nth person until we hit twenty, the spacing is evenly spaced so we weren't picking people we knew.

Creating the Infographic was a fun challenge. We used our design skill to come up with a layout that doesn't use a whole lot of labels only a few to say what each graph was for. We tried to make it as easily understandable as possible. We had compared boys to girls to see what end spends more money on average. 

What parts of the cycle were more difficult than you expected? Could you change anything about what you did to make it easier next time? Elaborate.

What I thought was most difficult in the cycle of creating an Infographic was, most likely trying to record all of the possible answers that people had and arrange them in to data that can make sense and be used to demonstrate what I can actually do.I do believe that the next cycle I attempt to do in a group or by myself I could do better, the main reason is I know how to approach a person with a serve is to be kind and courteous and say its for a school project and that it is only a short few questions, nothing about time. What parts of the cycle were most enjoyable or interesting? Explain why. I enjoyed when we had to assemble all of the info graphs into a single document and make it look all pretty and eye grabby. The reason I liked this is because I am a visual learner.

Here is a Link to our Infographic. 

Blog #1

My favorite project we have done in stats so far was our infographic we did. I was partnered with Hannah and Ryan. We asked the Juniors and Seniors questions about our school. We had the list of names of all the upperclassmen in the school and numbered them off. We then randomly chose 20 numbers from each grade and surveyed the corresponding kid to that number.  Our questions consisted of their favorite classes, about hybrids, their star rating, schools food, their iPad's, and siblings. Once we got all the information back we took what we found and made graphs that explained our information the best. 

What worked well in my group was that we got everybody surveyed that needed to be surveyed, even though we had a difficult time doing it. What was frustrating was that not everybody in our group was not helping. Once we got everybody back on track for our project they ended up making a graph for us. For our group the post-it notes did not help. There was a person missing so it was just talking to the other teammate. 

Even though it was fun it was difficult to complete. It was hard to get everybody surveyed that we needed just because sometimes it was hard to find them, or they weren't at school. It was also hard to make sure everybody in the group was doing their work or not. Even though the graphs were fun to make to show our information, it was hard to make sure they showed what we wanted to show. We had to make sure that our graphs made sense to the audience. We ended up having to change a lot of our graphs so they made more sense. Also making sure that our graphs looked nice on the paper was hard to do. I know I spent a lot of time making sure that the graphs were on the same line and centered in the page. Looking at it now I'm glad we spent more time on that because it does look nice. 

Overall this project was a lot of fun to do. I feel like I learned a lot about how to ask the right question and get results. I also learned what to do with the results once you get them. Making it a group project was better than doing it on our own because for many people it was their first time putting a survey together so getting help from others made it a lot more beneficial. I believe that the project was very helpful start to this class. What I got from this project will help in the projects to come. 

When i first signed up for stats I was not excited to take another math class. But after awhile I noticed that this really isn't even a math class. It's mostly projects. Which really helps with learning each section. And I really started to enjoy this class. I learned how to give a survey and read the data correctly. As well as making a project including the data. Which was my favorite project from this quarter. 

Infographic Project:
The part of the cycle that was more difficult than I expected was finding out the margins of error. There is nothing you can really do to help find that cause it is just confusing. 

The most enjoyable part of the cycle was collecting the data and looking at the results. Not all of the questions went the way I thought they would.

The biggest source of bias in our data collected was either household income or in house chores such as sweeping. We assumed that most women did the sweeping but after the survey we found that most men do as well. Some people could be lying about the household income.

We could improve the margin of error by asking more or even all of the Byron School District teachers. It would be worth the extra effort if we were trying to prove someone wrong about one of the questions we asked.

Yes it was worth it, and I am proud of the final project. Plus we had an interesting topic to learn about. If I could give future students advise i would tell them to ask questions that interest them not questions just to get the project done.

Our group did a good job of splitting up the work and all getting our data collected. The only frustrating this was not being able to help out with the graphs because they were on one computer so only that person could really work on it. As the project went on we all began to have more input on what the graphs should look like and how the data should be presented. It kind of helped. We got to tell each other what we needed to do differently which was good. But for the most part nothing changed.

During this project i learned how to make a survey, give a survey, analyze the data, and how to present the data in an interesting way. This project really helped me with understanding this unit so it was a great project. The project is also going to be useful for future references if I ever need to make a presentation that hold a lot of information but is also very easy to read and follow along. 

 

Info-graphic Poster

For our first project this quarter we did the infographic poster, we had to take a survey of Byron teachers from each school to find out gender roles in their household. In this project I had to ask the Elementary school teachers. It was difficult to find time to ask teachers. I ended up having to email the survey link to the teachers so we had some non-responses. To change this process I would have found a different time to come in and ask teachers to take the quiz to make our data more reliable. We ended up not having an equal number of men and women who took our survey so our results were not even and more biased towards men because we ended up having more men than women. After finding our results, we took all this information and made a poster. We also applied confidence intervals and margin of error to our results. 

 

During this project I learned how to give an accurate survey and who to give it to. To get accurate results you need a large sample size. You also need this sample to be completely random to avoid bias. After getting the survey results we learned how to take those and turn them into visually appealing graphs and charts. 

Infographic Project

From this project, I learned many things.  The first being what exactly a categorical variable is.  This helped pave the way for the rest of the quarter since we dealt with categorical data the whole time.  Another thing I learned was how to set up an interesting survey for people to take.  This is important in gathering data and it puts it all into an organized chart to take the information out.  Even with all that, you still need to do a random sampling of people, which is another thing I learned how to do.  To do this, there are many options.  You can do a completely random sample, or even a cluster sampling to get the information you need with the least amount of bias.

The first challenge I faced during this project was finding the people we had got in our random sample, and getting them to take the survey.  We either didn't know who they were, couldn't find them, or couldn't get them to take time out of their day to take it.  This could have posed a threat to our data if we had not overcome this by either making them take it, or taking more samples than we needed just in case there were some people we couldn't find.

Making everything visually appealing was an important, and fun, part of this project.  It helped with social skills because you had to know what people liked and wanted to see in a graph and if they would be able to decipher what was being said easily.  I felt that the graph making was an enjoyable part of the project, and helped me when we had to present the information.  You could tell with some groups that the person presenting didn't know the information because he or she didn't help with the presentation.  It was easy for me to present the information clearly because I knew what information was there and how to explain it easily.

Most of the results from the movie survey we did were pretty predictable.  One of these was what their preferred choice to watch a movie was.  This was Netflix.  Obviously, it is the most convenient way to watch a movie and it has a lot of options.  It came to no surprise that it was the preferred choice by most people.

College Infograph

College Info graphic - Samantha 

The first I ever heard of Stats that it was really hard and boring. You did a lot of homework with only a few projects. I decided to stay in Stats though. I remember that the first day felt like the begging of the end of my life. 

But when Mr. Pethan put us into our groups for the first projects I was really excited because we were doing real stats stuff and having fun. We tried to do a stratified random sample of the juniors and seniors. We wanted to know what these students were going to do after school. Our original data was proportional tot he amount of students are in each grade. I was very surprised that alot of the juniors we surveyed  had never been on a college visit. I also found it surprising that their were a few students who were not going to college and not going into the military either.

We were not so successful with our first survey method of organizes a way to give our survey and set up they was it perceived by people. When we got our feedback from Mr. Pethan we didn't do so hot on our grade. But after many hours of coming in before class and during lunch I made a better version of my info graph and re sent my infograph and got a better grade to improve my score. 

 

We got found out that a little bit of half of people are ready for college. Most seniors have been on 1 or more college visits compared to juniors who most haven't even been on one.  The majority of junior and seniors are going to go to college, where as on 28% of both grade are going to go into the military. Then we were surprised that just under half of students plan on going to an instate college. While 33% are going out of state and the other 20% hasn't decide where to go or if they are going at all.

Infograph

Throughout the quarter of Statistics, we didn't do too many projects, but even thought we didn't do many, I enjoyed making the info-graphic project. We got to learn how to properly take a survey and get the right data from it. So we took a survey of random Byron students and asked them a series of questions pertaining to their normal day routine and whether they like somethings at school, such as the lunch and what other opinions they had on things. Once we had all of the questions written down and made into a survey and people answered the questions, it was interesting to look back at the answers to see what they said compared to you. It was also fascinating to see what a certain person answered for every single answer and not just a bunch of answers for one question that you have to sort out.

My favorite part of the project was seeing the answers of other people and comparing it to what my answers would be and seeing how different school life is for individual people. My other favorite part of the project was after getting all of the information was making it into something fun and pleasant to look at. I thought this was the hardest part of the whole project, because in the beginning it's really hard to think of a theme for a bunch of data, but once you get an idea it's really fun to blend everything together and make it look really cool. After getting an idea of a theme and a general idea of how we want it to look like, we had to go through a cool website called Piktochart to make the each individual charts. It was a lot of fun to see what each graph could be made into and the diversity of the graphs. 

Overall I think that Stats was a pretty fun and enjoyed how creative people could get with their projects.

Post High School

At the beginning of the project we had to select a population. Some groups picked people at Starbucks so we picked people in our lunch. We asked all the juniors and seniors about some after school questions towards college. We came up with a total of 39% juniors and 61% percent seniors who took the survey. Our biggest controversy was the question if people were ready or not to go to college, 62% said yes while 38% said no. I am proud with our project and the way it turned out, for the future students I think they should work hard and make an awesome survey. 

I learned this unit how to exactly make a nice looking brochure that showed all of my survey results. I learned how to crop a photo just right to make it blend in with the rest of the photos. The project was useful for a beginner in the stats class to help him get a start on the basic groundings of statistics. What we really learned as a whole reflection is the way we did sampling is really bad sampling because it is not truly random. We just asked "random" people we "randomly" picked at lunch which is not completely random. There may be some under coverage with this system and many other flaws. To truly randomly ask people we must get a list of every single kid in the school and make up system of who we ask. The list of people is a lot better way of doing it because it gives everyone in the whole sample ( the whole school ) a chance to be picked. Making this brochure was a wonderful way to start off the class of stats. 

Spencers infographic poster

 

Intro



graph 1

        For this project we interviewed 44 students at Byron High School about a handful of movie related questions. we got a lot of good results but we thought it would be a lot better with a bigger sample size. Before this project I didn't know really anything about surveying and what we need to do to make a good survey. It was a very new experience for me. I've made presentations but I learned how to make a good graph and how to layout the graphs on slides to make it interesting. I think this was a good project for your to understand the main basis behind stats and to start to get an understanding in what the class is really all about.

 

graph 2

        In Graph 1 we asked students what aspects of movies are most important to making a good movie. The responses were even with cast and writing at 35% and special effects coming in third. Nothing came as to much of a surprise in this graph the data was pretty predictable. In Graph 2 we asked if they preferred a TV series or a movie. It was a pretty even split but movies was a little higher. This was interesting because I directly related this to Netflix users and which one was more used on Netflix TV shows or movies.



graph 3

       In Graph 3 we asked them their perfered way to watch a movie (Netflix, Redbox, Hulu, etc). The obvious majority was Netflix and that to me was very predictable. Netflix is crazy booming business with a huge outlet of users. In Graph 4 we asked their preferred genre of movie. Comedy and action movies had the biggest fans and are two of my favorites too but I expected more Sci-Fi lovers than the survey suggested.



graph 4

       All and all this project was my favorite. We had fun with our results and for this being our firsts survey and project we really learned the true meaning of a survey.  I'm proud of our end product but if I could give advise to anyone else it would be the make the presentation something you could look at in a magazine and not just flip the page cause its boring. Make it something that will catch your attention and keep you there.







Infographic survey

The thing that I remember the most from this quarter of stats is the infographic survey. It was a difficult project at first, but by the end it was easier and if you needed to make any changes on it it became even easier. Our group did a survey on college for upperclassmen.

Our survey was difficult to find the correct questions to ask at first and also to find who we should ask. Then once we had to make the graphs and find the margins of error and fit all of that onto the page without it becoming crowded and have it make sense took a while.

Since we had a lot of graphs it was hard to tell what the actual outcome was but it showed that a lot of upperclassmen are going to college.

At first our group did what we thought was a random sample. It was actually a convenience sample that wouldn't show the true population that we wanted to study. If we were to do this again we would have to do a SRS to truly find the correct population that we wanted to study

The overall project was fun and once you got into it a little more it was easy and wasn't as bad as it was in the beginning.

Infographic

Our first project of this quarter was the infographic project.  Through out the first quarter I think this was the most educational project\ way to learn.  I had a little bit of fun with it and learned a lot from it.  My group and I asked students about their home life.  For example how many pets they have and how many have jobs.  This project did a good job of showing how stats can help get information.  The project was interesting in itself but it also showed how to make different graph to show data.  It was fun to see how everyone responded to all the questions.  I made guesses before asking on how the answers would play out and it did not always follow along what I thought. We had to collect data appropriately for the situation. I never knew the type of questions and names to go along with all of that.  Bad data just wrecks the project.  So smart data with no bias is a must. I enjoyed how creative we got to be with the project.  How you present the data is important as well.  If you do not present it well no one will care to look at it.  Then your project goes to waste.  We as a group had to agree with what we choose but all together it was a pretty fun project.  This project was very educational.

Mitch's Infographic Project

The most enjoyable project I got to work on this quarter was the infographic. This was the most enjoyable because we got to conduct a survey on whatever we wanted to work on. This made the project very fun, because we could take the information we collected and display it in a way that we wanted to.

We designed our survey to yield information regarding gender roles in our teachers at Byron High School. Out of the survey, we received 38 responses: 22 males and 16 females.

Once we collected this information, we interpreted it and found which data sets were most surprising and interesting. One of the categories that stood out was our 'Household Income' category. Of our sample, 79% of men reported having a larger income than their wife. Since this is a relatively lop-sided proportion, we decided to display this in a pie chart to show the large difference.

One odd question we decided to ask was, "Which side of the bed do you sleep on?" Unfortunately, this question didn't yield any interesting results. If it would have, however, it would be intriguing to find out why this happened.

The best work I did on this project was on the layout of the infographic itself. I made everything uniformed so it would be easy to interpret for readers. Purple means the stat pertains to boys, and pink is for girls. Additionally, I wanted to add the purple line that guides the reader's eye from one chart to the next.

Overall, this project was great because we were able to, basically, do whatever we wanted within reasonable limit.

My favorite project so far in statistics has been the info-graphic project. We created an info-graphic based off of questions we asked band students at a regional band clinic.  We got to learn about creating graphs in Piktochart and making the data easy to understand.  This was the first project that we did in this class, and I think it was a perfect way to introduce us to the basics of stats.

I enjoyed learning all about how to properly obtain and display statistics using graphs and charts.  Another great aspect of this project was the fact that we were learning how to do things, like calculating the margin of error, that we would need for the rest of the class and probably later on in life.  For our survey we did a stratified random sample taking five band students from every band at the clinic.  Through this we found a lot of interesting data and, although we didn't record it since this was supposed to be single variable statistics, we noticed some discrepancies based on the school you went to while taking the survey.  The most interesting statistic we found is that around 57% of students practice 1-3 hours a week which seemed to be higher than I would expect.  If I were to do this project again, I would probably try to survey more than thirty people to get some better results with smaller confidence intervals.

Prom Survey

The project I liked the most was our group surveys. My group did our survey on prom which was pretty interesting because it is coming up and is a big deal for some people. I really enjoyed it because it taught me how to gather information that is not flawed and will get me the most accurate results. It also helped me learn how to present information in a fun and effective way that will get people to be interested. This information also had to be understandable for the reader so they know exactly what they are looking at. It took quite a bit of time to play around with different charts and make them look exactly how I wanted them, but it was fun to play with my creative side.

One of the things that surprised me was the amount of money girls spent on prom. Close to half of the girls we surveyed spent $400 or more on prom. Compared to the guys, which most of them spent less than $400 dollars. I learned a lot from the different projects we did, but this one was my favorite.

Prom Infographic

My favorite project was the infographic assignment. My group took a stratified random sample of people in 10th-12th grade. We asked people a variety of questions about prom and post prom.  I feel like this was a good choice for a topic because it is relevant because it is prom season. I liked the fact that we asked people from both genders.  This allowed us to compare the two and see what guys thought vs what girls thought. If I were to redo this project, I would not survey sophomores. A lot of them won't be going to prom, and it just made our data skewed.

Out of all of the graphs on our infographic, the last one is my favorite. It is about how much people plan to spend on prom. I think the way that we made our graph was really cool.  It was also interesting to compare how much girls plan on spending versus what the guys plan on spending. The results shown on this graph were basically what I expected.  Most girls spend a ton of money on a dress, shoes, hair, nails, etc., while guys only spend like $150-200 on a tux.  I was really surprised that two guys said that they planned to spend more than $601.

Another graph that I found interesting was the one about excitement levels.  Girls were much more excited than guys, which is somewhat to be expected. We found that senior guys were much more excited than sophomore or junior guys.  I thought that this was interesting since most seniors have been to prom before and you would think that the people that haven't gone before would be much more excited than the ones that have.

This project was my favorite because of the freedom we had. We got to choose the topic that we wanted to survey people about.  We could basically choose whatever we thought would be interesting.  This was nice because it allowed us to become more involved in the project. I also liked the freedom we had when designing our infographic. We got to express our own creativity.

Stats Infographic Project

This quarter in statistics, my favorite project was the infographic one. This was our first big project of the class and for my group we had to go out and collect data of HVL band students from a quiz we generated. The point of this project was to select a population, design questions, collect the data, analyze the data, graphically display it,and present it as a story. 

The part that was most difficult about was collecting data from other schools because we had to converse with them. If I could make things easier, I would sample students from just Byron. Unfortunately, this would make the results somewhat biased. The part I found most interesting was the results that we got. I didn't think people actually practiced their instruments but a surprising amount do. I liked that we got opinions from other schools but at the same time I found it difficult to talk to them and explain why we needed them to take our survey. 

Our biggest source of confusion was that students practice an average of 1-3 hours a week. This could be confused because some students might be required to practice while others may not. The margins of error are large because our sampled group might not have been accurate. We could have selected a bunch of students that just really like band, when not all students do. You could improve this by taking a larger sample. If you were a part of a big experiment, you would need accurate results if they depended on something bigger, such as something in the medical field that could depend on your life. 

After a lot of revision, I think it was worth it because our end product was excellent. I am proud of our end product because we spend a good amount of time in Photoshop revising the color scheme and now it is a lot easier to read. If I were to give advice to future students, I would tell them to get their colors and data right the first time so they don't have to revise it so much in the end. Make sure the colors go well together and make the graphs visually appealing and easy to read. 

In my group, it worked well that we were all in band because it was easy to get our results on the day of the clinic. The most frustrating part was communication. We found it difficult to divide up the work so that we all had something to do. After getting more comfortable with the group, we were able to discuss our plans better which made our final product the best. The feedback activity helped because we realized the things we needed to fix and from that point we were successful. 

During this project I learned that communication is key. In order to get accurate results, you need to sample a large group of people. This sample must be random to avoid bias. I like working in groups because then we didn't have to do all of the work ourselves. At first, we had a hard time choosing who did what, but in the end it all worked out because we got 100% on the project. I would still prefer to choose my group because we get along better. I think it was helpful that some of us have strengths and weaknesses. For example, they were better at using the computer to display our visuals. I was better at making the charts and making them visually appealing. Together, the combination of our strengths and weaknesses worked well together. I think the skills we learned in class helped make this presentation good. This project was useful because we learned how to apply what we learned to the project. I think these two things worked well together to make a successful product. I've attached the final product below.