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. 

Rebecca Houston's Honors Project

Through the course of my Honors Project, I have learned a lot about applying statistics to the real world. Following Mr. Pethan on his project/experiment was a very valuable learning experience. This project gave me a deeper understanding of not only the curriculum we learn in the classroom but how it is applicable to many scenarios. The entire experiment as a whole was put in place to see which 5^th grade class was learning stronger learning skills in the classroom. There were two types of  classrooms that we assessed, the first being a standard classroom which taught curriculum and the second being a classroom that used project based curriculum to teach their students. The assessments that I graded had to deal with the creative portion of learning. Students were presented the task of creatively distributing a new invention to various groups of people. The assessment was so difficult because it was asking 5^th grade students to be incredibly expansive on as the questions got narrower in content. Although there was some bias in our experiment the data was still very useful. The data helped us show that there was no significant difference between each classroom. There was also no significant difference if the student that we were testing was a male or a female. Also, when we plugged the numbers into StatKey we found that our regression line on a few graphs did not show substantial correlation or causation between the student`s MCA Score and their creative thinking. The data that we found did not follow the normal bell curve shape and it showed us that across the board creativity is not something that is strongly applied to the curriculum. The creativity that students exhibit may just come from their raw, individual creative thinking. Regardless of the data, I think it is important that we continue to apply creative thinking into the curriculum of young students. If we continued to apply creative thinking into the curriculum I do believe you would see some difference between the students who have creative thinking and the students who do not. The end of the year examines will be very interesting.  For further examinations I think it would be interesting to combine the creative portion of thinking with the critical thinking aspect that so many students have well developed. There are also many other directions that we can take to evaluate thinking both critically and creatively. The assessment was very useful because it showed me how the statistics and lessons that I learned in the classroom could be applied to find out actual statistics and solve problems outside the classroom. I learned that collecting data talks a lot more time then actually sitting down and analyzing the data. Although the data did not turn out how we initially thought the data has lots of valuable content. It shows us improvements that we can make in research and collecting data and differences in the curriculum that we teach students.

Rebecca Houston -- Minute to Win It

Over the course of the Fall Statistics Class my favorite project would have to be the Minute to Win It Experiment. Doing this experiment was fun because we got to decide what experiment we wanted to do and we got to test people ourselves. I also learned the most during the course of the Minute to Win It Experiment all because of the paper that we had to write after we did all of the experiments. 

Writing the paper taught me how to correctly use p-value, difference in means, null and alternative hypothesis, and it helped me realize the power of numbers in statistics. I learned what numbers were valuable and I learned what values were statistically insignificant. This project also taught me a lot of inconsistencies and errors. Before this project I always believed that you could have an experiment happen with very few errors. This is a fantasy, I learned just how difficult it was to have a "perfect" experiment. It is incredibly difficult, even though this experiment was only contestants moving a cookie from their forehead to their mouth, the data that we retrieved and the errors that we noticed were incredibly complex for such a simple experiment.

I enjoyed this experiment because it was the most fun and I learned the most. This project was the most applicable project that we did all semester because we applied what we were learning to a project that we completely in charge of. This project was the highlight of my statistics class.

Ultimate Frisbee

Throughout my Stats Experience I felt that there were many awesome projects that we did.  But the one that I felt was the best was the Ultimate Frisbee Unit.  Not only did I enjoy the playing of Ultimate Frisbee but I also liked the drafting of the players.  I learned about how to use z-score to our advantage and what attributes to use.  I also learned what attributes I should not pick.  I enjoyed playing with my team, even though we only won one game.  The reason we did Ultimate Frisbee was to show the relationship between good statistics and statistics that were not needed.  We used a spread sheet to find the attributes that we wanted, then we found a Z-score to find the power ranking.  We decided to use touchdowns, Short completions, and Long completions.  We did not use the defensive side of the spread sheet, which probably led to our downfall in the draft.  What I learned from this project is that I now know how to use the data to find what you are looking for in a person.  You can apply this to hiring people to work for a company, which is somewhat similar to drafting a player.  You could use this to try to find the best person for the job or game.  It uses statistical data to select the best overall player, instead of going by a gut feeling.

Fav Stats Project

     When I first signed up for statistics, I was not expecting so many projects.  There was a lot of homework and videos to watch but there was almost a project for every section. This really made it a lot easier to learn the material needed for the quizzes and tests.

     My favorite project throughout the entire course of statistics was our GapMinder project.  My partner, Mara, and I compared the murders (per 100,000 people) and children per women (total fertility).  The countries we mainly focused the results on were Guatemala, China, Sri Lanka because they were the ones who showed the most movement when we were observing our graphs.

     We later learned that these two factors were, for the most part, related to each other because it seemed the higher the population, the higher the murder rates; not counting all the other events happening within the countries contributing to the results.

     This is my favorite project because it allowed us to use what we have learned so far in stats, and apply it to our presentations.  This helped me better understand this unit far more successfully than any other project we had.

Gapminder Project: Mikayla Winkels

            When first approaching the start of my senior year, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I didn't enjoy the homework, because I felt as though I learned more from the hands-on projects we completed. Throughout this semester we have completed quite a few projects, and the one I enjoyed the most would be the Gapminder Video. I partnered up with Cory Wentland, and we had to choose an x-axis and a y-axis to compare countries throughout the entire world. We chose Mean Years in School (Woman of the reproductive age 15 to 44) as our x-axis, and Children Per Woman (Total Fertility) as our y-axis. Starting in 1971, the trend of the majority of the countries was relatively the same. The majority of countries around 1971 had three to nine children per woman, and then dramatically decreases as each year goes until we hit 2008. 

     Why is that? Well back in the day, most women stayed home and let the men of their lives to provide for their families. However, women starting fighting for their rights in the early 1900s, proclaiming that they could claim their own independence without a man. Meaning, that now a days, its normal for a woman to go to college so she can obtain a degree in the career field of her choice. The trend that we observed is that the longer women are in school, the fewer children she will have. This trend only really relates to high income countries, such as the United States, England, Canada, Japan, etc. We notice on our Gapminder that low income countries tend to still have more children. These countries come from South America, but mostly Africa. 

    Some countries we noticed, China and Yemen, our somewhat outliers, compared to the rest of the countries. Yemen in the 1970s increases, due to their traditional values. Having a male infant is very important in this country, since the family name is carried on through the male. China steadily decreases, increases, and then dramatically decreases. This is due to the One-Child Policy that the China government in forced, since they were overpopulating. This factor is probably not the entire reason why women are producing less children in the late 1950s and early 2000s, but education should be considered as a big factor.  Besides these two countries, everyone else follows the general pattern. Over the past four decades, more woman are gaining more education during their reproductive ages, which does have an impact how many children they have. 

    Overall, this class was somewhat enjoyable. If it weren't for the projects, honestly I wouldn't have learned and understood most of the concepts. I would suggest keeping all the projects we completed this semester, and thanks for a great semester! 

Ultimate Frisbee -- Michelle Denney

My favorite part of this stats semester was drafting an ultimate Frisbee dream team. I really felt like I understood this project and retained a lot of the information I learned. For this project, my partner and I found the qualities of a player we considered important and ranked our players based on these qualities.

One of these qualities was the percentage of short catches attempted and short catches made. This is one of the dark purple sections on the chart above. We considered this an important quality because a player with a high completion percentage has more potential than a player who can just run fast. We calculated out the z-score of this percentage to later use in a formula.

Another quality we found important was the percentage of long catches attempted and long catches made.  This percentage is the middle dark purple column on the chart above. We found the z-score of these percentages and later put it into a formula that we used to find the overall top player of ultimate Frisbee.

The last quality we found important was the percentage of how many short catches were made when the player was defending compared to how many were attempted. We chose short catch defense instead of long catch defense because we decided it was more difficult to defend a short pass than a longer pass. This percentage is the dark purple column that is farthest to the right.

Watching Moneyball made this project easier because it made me realize that in order to be successful, you must pick the most important qualities of players and disregard other unimportant qualities.  You must figure out why certain characteristics are important in order to have a good team. Moneyball was a great example of this. Playing Ultimate Frisbee made me realize short catches, long catches, and defense are all important to being an all around successful player.

Ultimate

    One project that I really enjoyed was the Ultimate Frisbee draft.  It felt like an MLB draft because every team had a different strategy for choosing the players that they did.  My team chose to draft based on touchdowns and total completions per player.  We didn't do very well in the simulated season, in fact we got second to last place.  After the fact we realized that we should have drafted based on some other statistics like a defensive stat or completion percentage instead of number of completions.  The whole idea behind the draft was to pick players that would win your games and ultimately win the championship.  You couldn't draft players based on just one statistic because if you did then your team would only be good in that one stat.  Your players had to be the best all around players and mix with the others to make the ultimate team.  Below is a picture of our data and power rankings.

Moneyball

I felt like I learned the most from our Moneyball project. I also thought it was the most interesting project that we did in this class. I really enjoyed the whole project. I thought that using multiple regression data to analyze our players and choose the best ones was really interesting. I also liked using formulas in Microsoft Excel in order to analyze and rank our players. It was really cool how we could analyze thousands of data points so quickly using Excel.

I really liked the second quarter of stats a lot  more than the first. I felt like I learned a lot more from the projects that we did instead of just learning with problems like in the first quarter. I wish we could have either spread the projects out between both quarters or found a way to incorporate more projects in the first quarter.

I thought the Moneyball project was the most interesting because I felt like it was the one that really showed me a real world application for stats. During Moneyball I felt like I could honestly see myself doing something with statistics in the future, and that really excited me. I really enjoyed the Moneyball project.

Ultimate Frisbee Project - Alec Helget

The project that I enjoyed the most in this class was the Ultimate Frisbee project.  I enjoyed applying our knowledge of z-scores and numbers to something that I could actually visualize.  Having played ultimate in the past I had some idea of what skills are important in the game to maximize your wins. This project interested me greatly because I enjoy the game of ultimate and it was a nice change to projects with numbers that you can't connect to.

Power Ranking Top 10

During this project I learned how to apply numbers and percentages to make a z-score.  I also learned how to make histograms that allowed you to accurately choose which players were the most valuable. Once we found the percentages of short throw completions, long throw completions, and short defense percentage we combined these numbers into a single z-score.  This allowed us to rank all the players in a power ranking system to determine which players were the best.  Once we reached the draft it was very easy to pick our players because we just went down the line.  Our team, drafted by Colin, Shane, and myself ended up winning the class tournament so I think the method we used worked extremely well.

Jake Leif's Stats Final Quarter

During this last quarter of stats, I really learned a lot.  Were these all things that I could write down on paper or recite from memory?  No, but it was pretty much all hands on learning.  Whether it was the experimental games or the Moneyball Ultimate Frisbee project, I felt that I took different pieces of knowledge from each project.  But, out of these two, I found the Moneyball Ultimate Frisbee project to be the most helpful.

I felt that this project made a bigger impact for me because I felt like I understood it more.  Not only did Mike and I do a good job in strategically picking our team, but we both took the time to understand what we truly wanted in an ultimate frisbee team.  The equation, created by Mike, really grasped the understanding of how to choose a team based off of both offense and defense.  We were then able to apply this equation to the long list of players that we were given.  Even though we didn't win, I felt like I learned a lot through this process.  The part that made this project stand out to me, more than the others, was the fact that I now feel that I can use this information in the future.  Excel is a program that could be used for many things, and even having a basic understanding of the functions that you can use is a big help.

Now don't misunderstand me, the experimental games were also fun, but also a lot more stressful.  I also don't feel that I learned nearly as much during that project because we were so rushed on time.  The Moneyball Ultimate Frisbee project seemed more laid back and easily understandable.  I don't feel that I could go out and use my knowledge gained during the experimental games as much as I could with the knowledge I gained during the Moneyball Ultimate Frisbee project.

This final quarter of stats, obviously more project based than the first quarter, I felt was more fun than the first.  This being said, I felt that the first quarter provided more statistical knowledge and the second half seemed sloppy and rushed.  I personally think that the first and second quarter should be mixed together so that the projects are intertwined with the lessons.

Ultimate Frisbee Draft -- Colin

My favorite project in stats class was definitely drafting ultimate frisbee teams.  We got to do a lot of preparation for the final/ big part of the project.  First we actually played ultimate frisbee and were told to keep track of stats that we thought were important to having a good team.  Then Mr. Pethan had us watch Money Ball.  Money Ball is about how statistics started to have a role in baseball.  Baseball scouts before used their gut feeling to draft guys, now teams use all kinds of crazy statistics to get the best players.  

 After we got a better understanding on statistics in sports we had to get into groups with our classmates and figure out a draft process for an up coming ultimate frisbee league.  My group mates were Shane and Alec.  All of us were football players which helped us immensely because football is like ultimate frisbee in the grand scheme of things. All of us watch football a lot; we had the understanding that defense wins championships, just like the Seattle Seahawks. So our number one priority was getting a good defense. We broke down pass breakup percentage for long and short throws.  After we go our top defenders we picked up the best short catch receivers.  This is similar to the “ground and pound” offense in football, which is breaking down the defense with short plays that are very safe plays. We drafted going from the top down on our own specific power rankings.  Obviously we were right on our draft selection because we won the championship.

I learned a lot about how important statisticians are to sports.  Their methods save money for whatever organization they are working for.  I also learned how important it is to have the same ideal player for the kind of team you want.  Team work and communication are very important.  This was such a fun and eye opening project.  It was good to work with a team and get different views on things.  Sadly, I was gone for a day, so I missed the nuts and bolts of the project which is when you get the graphs from the Excel documents in order.  I wish I could of had a chance to see how Shane did all of that.  Overall this was a fun, social, competitive, physical, and learning project.

Minute to Win it: Tilt a Cup

                 My favorite project was the Minute to Win it game. I liked it because it gave us the 

freedom to completely choose our own project and rules. This meant that every group was doing a 

different game, but still collecting similar data.  Our game was called Tilt-a-Cup, which is a game 

where both the player and the data collector are involved. After we collected data from fifteen different subjects, we ran it through a bootstrap hypothesis test on StatKey.  From this we found our p-values and confidence intervals. In the end I think that this was a very educational project. I learned a lot from it and it was a fun experiment to conduct.

Minute to Win it Game

In this statistics class with Mr.Pethan we did several project that let us expand on the things we were learning in class. Of the project one of my favorites was the minute to win it game. We got to create a game of our choice with our team. Our group wanted to come up with a creative game that was also fun to watch. We wanted to test whether the length of the noodle affected how well the player was able to place rings into a basket.

The game of Noodles is played by using thick spaghetti noodles to pick up rings . The noodles must be held by the individual’s mouth, and they could not use any other body part or prop besides that noodle to lift each ring.  The rings then had to be placed in a “bucket”.Each person played two games: one with a full length noodle, and one game with only half of a noodle. Our group hypothesized that individuals would do better with the half length noodle because it would offer them more control. Using randomization we performed this experiment and used statkey to calculate the data, and concluded that our null hypothesis was correct. 

Overall this project was really hands on and enjoyable and I think we all had fun doing it.

Food Preferences of Downtown Rochester

                 For our Food Preferences of Downtown Rochester project, Lia, Andrew, and I used a systematic survey and asked every fourth person that walked by the Peace Plaza downtown. Overall, we ended with twenty-nine responses. Not every person we asked agreed to take our survey, but those who did agree to take it answered a variety of different questions about food (see graphs for examples). 

                After we surveyed them, we decided which questions we thought were the most interesting. Then, we split the results between men and women and made images that portrayed their choices. It was interesting to see the answers people gave, and I was curious to see if knowing a person's gender would help you guess which answer they chose. 

               We did not have a large enough sample size to prove that knowing a person's gender would help you guess which answer they chose, but it is still a possibility that gender would make a difference. So, if I were to do this project again, or continue it in the future, my first priority would be getting a larger sample size. 

               I liked this project, because I am a hands-on learner. Instead of using random data, we actually got to collect the data this time, which I thought was very beneficial to see how the process worked up close. After we collected our data, I enjoyed making the graphs on Piktochart, because it was a new website and I got an insight on how to make your data easy to read and captivating. 

             

End of Term Post

My favorite project of the term was our Ultimate Frisbee draft. I did spent most of my time on this project and really enjoyed it. I thought that it was cool to see how some of the stuff we learned actually applied to the real world. Adding in the sports aspect also made this project particularly interesting to me. I found it very cool that people in professional sports actually spent money to hire statisticians to find the best players.

For this project I worked with Colin and Alec. We started by breaking down all of the percentages for each player. These included short catch completion, long catch completion and short defense percentage. After that we found z-scores for those three categories. by combining all of those z-scores we were able to come up a with an overall power ranking. To  check for consistency in our top players we created histograms. The histograms showed us that some of our top players were really only good in one skill. We used this information to draft a team that we felt comfortable with and in the end we won our class tournament.

 Power Rankings:

In this project we kind of combined several things that we learned in the class. We learned how to utilize data and put it into z-scores. We also learned how to place that data into charts to help support our reasoning. Finally I learned a lot more about Excel than I knew previously.