Divorce rate in Maine and consumptions of margarine?

Doesn’t seem like both of those are related in any way? Well, here I am to tell you all about why they might have correlation. Correlation might be a new word for you all. It essentially represents two things that follow the same trend. Maybe the amount of cheese you have correlates with foot size? Do you see the word relate in the word cor-(relate)? Is it all starting to make sense now? Well I hope it does because we are moving on! 

Now just because something could be correlated, doesn’t mean they could cause each other. Maybe having big feet doesn’t cause you to buy lots of cheese. Causation is the act of causing something, if that wasn’t already obvious. 

Causation and Correlation were introduced to us at the beginning of our project. Our project consisted of trying to find something that has correlation and causation and something that has correlation and no causation. My partner, Emily ,  and I decided to use something related to technology, because its such a big part of teenagers lives, especially our age. Throughout the whole project, there were 3 curricular competencies that went along side this project. Each one was supposed to help us in future learning. 

Our first correlation that we felt had causation, was Device Charging Rate vs. How Long Until Your Neck Start to Hurt. What we found was the more times a person charges their device, the more their neck starts to hurt. Pretty self-explanatory, right? We took a sample from the whole grade of grade 9 at Seycove and we included in our survey questions like how much you neck hurts, and more than 50% said, on a scale of 1-10, it hurts about an 8 or 9, which are pretty high numbers. We concluded that the more times a person charges their device, the more neck pain is caused, therefore there is causation and a correlation. 

Following and using the curricular competencies were a bit of a challenge for us. Our biggest reason was because most in-class days we were given to use for research, we spent fooling around which cost us a lot of time. It was the last 3 or 4 classes, and at home, where we got our act together. We started communicating well, which is our first curricular competency. Our communication was key because we had to split the jobs up, otherwise there would be too much work on one person and the other would just get a free pass. Emily took charge of creating questions for our survey, sending them to everyone she knew, collecting the data and putting them in graphs, creating our project outline, making the final keynote and animating slides & transitions. I took on coming up with the ideas, making our survey, sending to everyone I knew, writing our script and touching up the finishing product. I think we demonstrated communication well, and thats why we had a finish product that we were proud to present to the class and Mr. Gross. 

Our other correlation but no causation was Device Charging Rate vs. How Many Pairs of Shoes You Buy a Year. In our second survey, which Emily came up with questions for and I made, we asked how many people usually shop online, specifically for shoes. Not many said they do, most go to the stores and buy them there. But there were a couple few who shop online, but not for shoes. We also asked how many shoes people buy a year, and they answered were pretty average. Looking at our data we could safely say that this does have some correlation, but no causation. 

 

Our last survey, we didn’t feel like we asked specific questions that would get us the data that we needed so we decided to talk about some possible question options, outside of class time. We applied our previous skills and innovated or expanded to something that was actually useful. We used our survey taking skills and better questions to get a better outcome. 

We showed math and our data through a bar graph, a scatter plot graph, and showing our raw survey results in our presentation. Using this language was 100% easier to show our conclusions and we broke it down quite well for the audience to understand. 

Finishing this already long blog post, I feel we did learn and use the curricular competencies but not to their fullest. There was definitely more we could’ve done to get a rainbow, and next time I want to achieve that by not getting distracted and using my time efficiently in class. 

Well now I got to go write 3 more blog posts, so if you will excuse me…

~Malaika