One of our Science Olympiad friends has had illness at her house of late so we had to do some studying on our own this week. We had fun creating a set of data, graphing it, and interpreting it. Let me share our little experiment with you that we used as a way to collect data points.
Maybe you've heard of this one.
Using a pipette we counted how many drops of water different coins could hold before teh water tension broke and leaked onto the table.
Our hypothesis was that the quarter would hold the most drops of water compared to a dime, nickel or penny. It's the biggest with the most surface area, right?
That was not what we found. We found that the nickel actually held the most water. This confused us. We tested the quarter three times total and the nickel twice. We got the same result (nickel holds more) each time. Maybe the smoother surface or different edge has something to do with it. ??
Anyway, so then we made a line graph, bar graph, and pictograph with our data.
From there we had a discussion about outliers using these videos as reference:
That one (above) gets a little technical but is helpful on some level. (We also used his set of data to discuss mode)
Here's another video that brings it down a notch for elementary school students.
I think this next one was actually the most helpful. There's a lot of information here. We stopped the video multiple times to go over various concepts.
The girls are also going to need to know something about accuracy and precision. I certainly don't remember learning this stuff as a kid! I'm glad that they are getting a head start on something that most people might consider to be a "tough" subject: Statistics. Maybe it won't seem scary to them when they get to higher levels of math because they'l remember having fun with it as kids. ?? hopefully, right?
This article helped a lot to get our feet when on this topic.
Fun times.
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