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