Day 3: Statistics

Wednesday started with tying up some loose ends from Tuesday by finishing the last round of probes from yesterday.




Then we did an engineering activity to get the kids brains working. Each group of three was given 2 pieces of spaghetti, 2 straws, 2 rubber bands, 1 mailing label and challenged to suspend a paperclip as far off a desk as possible.







It is always fun seeing all of the different designs they have come up with to get that paper clip to dangle.

Sadly it can't all be games and we had to sit down and do a little lecturing. We went over the basics of designing a hypothesis, independent and dependent variables, controls, and constants. We also spent some time talking about the project rubric and a little time talking about cheating and plagiarism. Plagiarism is a serious offense at the high school and we really wanted the campers to realize that we really don't care if they prove their hypothesis to be correct. We really care about quality, documentation, and nature of the work being done. Whether it works out or not does not matter to us as teachers. This point is a very important one to get across to the soon-to-be freshmen.



After lunch, we needed to have some fun so we blew some bubbles! However, we still needed to learn something so luckily blowing bubbles is a great way to get a lot of data FAST! Campers were to count how many bubbles they could blow in one breath. They repeated this 10 times. After that, we diluted the mixture and hypothesized what would happen to the number of bubbles blown.






We then analyzed all of our bubble data we collected. So we broke out the minis and entered all of the data into Excel. Here we talked about the importance of graphs and which are the best to use. We also showed campers how to use Excel to make graphs, box and whiskers plot, and to see if their data is statistically significant by performing a t-test.








As dry as these topics are, most of the analysis they will do on their year-long projects involve these methods. So the campers being exposed to it now, will really benefit them during the analysis phase of the project. Thank god we had freeze pops to cool us off!