Hey Y’all, Max here.
The second project in this year is over already. That project being causation vs correlation, where we had to find the connections between two or more different subjects, with data we found from students.
I’ll just start off by saying that I quite enjoyed this project. Maybe that’s because there was almost no math involved, but I really did find this to be a decent and enjoyable project.
This was a group project. My partners for this were Alfie, and Sylas.
The project began on October 15, more than a month ago. The first milestone we did enabled us to plan a survey we were going to conduct. The very first survey we wanted to do was to find the correlation between gender reveal parties, and forest fires between Vancouver and Palo Alto, California. This was a good ambition, but there were a few issues, such as: the only reason we chose Palo Alto was because Alfie had relatives there, and the sample size would have been small, Vacouver doesn’t get any forest fires except for in the summer, and even then, we certainly don’t get as many as California. So eventually we dropped that survey, in favour of a better one: Do longer weekends cause more or less stress about schoolwork?
This was, in our eyes, the perfect question. We always hear people our age complain about how tired they are, so why not give them a chance to say why? And anyways, there were a few other groups doing surveys about stress, so I thought we would make our survey higher-quality, and stand out from the other groups. Around this time we also spent the majority of one class hanging printed QR codes everywhere we could around the school. Unfortunately, literally every other group in the school did the exact same thing, so there were really no winners. I would say the only downside to this whole printed QR code frenzy was that Mr. Hughes lost a lot of printer ink.
For milestone 4, we had to chart our data on a graph. Now if I’m going to be honest, a lot of this was done by Alfie and Sylas, and I contributed more minimally. Personally I think we did a great job of plotting our data in a numbers document, and recording all 4 classes each student had. As for milestone 5, that was planning our presentation, which we would show our findings in. We did kind of get carried away planning our presentation, and ended up making our final presentation, which was milestone 6. We presented on the 16th. It went pretty smoothly except for the fact I was deathly ill the previous day, and my voice sounded terrible. I also flubbed a few lines, but it could have been worse.
The core competencies:
Represent mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial, and symbolic forms-
I showed this by graphing all of our data in a numbers document, and logging all the classes that each student had. Additionally, our final presentation displayed all or most of the data we collected, and put them into visual graphs.
Communicating and Representing: Use mathematical vocabulary and language to contribute to mathematical discussions-
We had to do this the whole project, discussing our plans for pretty much every milestone, especially when we charted our data. Despite there not being much math in this project, there were a lot of times when we had to use mathematical vocabulary.
Planning and conducting: Planning the presentation was a pretty difficult task because all three members of my group had different ideas as to what it should look like. I think that figuring out a good solution is a good example of this core competency.
Applying and innovation: applying all the knowledge we learned throughout the project and displaying it in our presentation was a pretty daunting task. Again, I feel as if the hardest part was collaborating with my group members on the best way to show (apply) our work and make a good presentation overall.
My overall thoughts on this project is pretty positive overall. This felt like one of those projects that I just drifted through, doing whatever was required of me. I’m not saying group projects are a chance to kick back and let my teammates do the work, but I’m saying that group projects are the best chance to improve upon my own skills, as I am in an environment that has less risk if something I try goes wrong ( if I try something new in a group project and it goes wrong, it won’t just be me who has to clean it all up. ). Anyways, I quite enjoyed working with Alfie and Sylas, and I think we genuinely had good results. The driving question this time around is:
How are correlation and causation different?
This is a slightly confusing question to me, so I will answer as honestly as I can. Causation is the event that happens, which is impacted or started by correlation, which is two or more things that happen either at once or over time, which may not have a pre-existing connection to each other, but by using correlation and causation, you can make a connection between them by finding connections. Sorry if that was confusing, but I am not great with scientific language, and I probably got more than one thing wrong. If you want a more accurate explanation, go here. Anyways, until next time.
