Math 3 Unit 9

Part 1

I think the most important thing i learned was what percentiles were and how to find/use them. I always heard about these, like the weight percentiles or height percentiles the doctor gives you at checkups, but never really understood what they meant. Now, I can understand what these stats mean in terms of the data.

Since percentiles are used so often to help explain data points and such, they will be important moving on. One thing that helped me understand were the notes we captured on what they were. They explained to me how a percentile was a measurement or indication of how many data points in a given set are lower than the specific data point you are looking at. This gives a sign of how extreme that data point is, and can be used to calculate whether that point is statistically significant, a very important skill that we will use a lot now and later.

Part 2

I specifically learned what statistically significant meant. Before, I would just look that the means of data and if one was higher, or higher enough, then I would conclude there was a significant difference. I understand now that you need to run a large amount of randomization tests and compare if the original mean is within the most extreme 5%.

For this project, we first had to come up with what we wanted to test. This was honestly the hardest part, because we really had to idea what to do. After quite a bit of consideration, and some inspiration from some classmates, we decided on the color influence experiment. Next, we decided how we wanted to test it. We choose to use a Google Form so it would be easy to distribute them to participants and collect data in one place.

One part of the project that did turn out very well was our data collection design. The idea of the Google form was very easy to use to get participants. We didn't find people at lunch and use their time to do it, so we got a fairly large amount of respondents. We could post announcements on our messaging platforms and find quite a few people there.

One thing that didn't go well was the presentation. My partner and I did not have communications over the weekend as she did not have internet, and she didn't know what we had to present on Monday, so we barely had time to prepare. We had a bit of miscommunication during the presentation, but it wasn't too bad. It just wasn't very smooth. Next time, I would make sure we had reliable communication to avoid something like this from happening again.