Exploration Ideas

List of previously submitted IA's (Yes you can choose these too)

Aesthetics

• Calculating beauty–the golden ratio

• Colour preferences

• Daylight in a classroom–architectural design

• Is my mirror showing an accurate image?

• M.C. Escher: Symmetry and infinity of art

• Modelling the surface area of the glass dome of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Italy

• Searching for the ideal sound

• Shadows and height

Business and finance

• A comparative study of shares, real estate, bonds and banks

• Analysis of stock market changes

• Applications of calculus to the economics of firms

• Buying a car or a house–payment options

• Code breaking

• Economic development and levels of income

• Finding the lowest values of the dimensions of differently shaped storage rooms using differential calculus and optimisation

• International phone call pricing

• Statistics on flight information for an international airline

Food and drink

• Costs of products bought online compared to local grocery stores

• Dine in or dine out?

• How many peas are there in a 500 gram box of peas?

• Jelly bean study

• The cookie problem–taste is all-important

• The operation of a tuck shop

• The volume of an egg

• What is the greatest candy bar in the world?

Health and fitness

• A comparison between calorie intake and gender

• A comparison between lung capacity, age, weight and body fat

• Aids awareness in Maseru

• Blood pressure

• Breakfast and school grades

• Breast and cervical cancer–ethnic comparison

• Infant mortality

• Investigating reaction times

• The SIR model in relation to world epidemics

Geometry and trigonometry

• Geodesic domes

• Graph theory–finding the shortest path

• Newton-Raphson

• Origami applications to mathematics

• Sine waves in pitch frequencies

• Spanning trees

• Spherical geometry

• Stacking bricks

• The ideal cut of a diamond

• The Ferris wheel

• The open Knight’s Tour on a chessboard

• Topography and distance

Nature and natural resources

• Airfoil and lift force

• Analysis of the cost and utility of gas versus electricity in an average domestic situation

• Animal population

• Calculating the time of sunrise and sunset

• Chaos theory: universal prediction

• Counting weeds

• Earthquakes–can they be predicted?

• Florence Nightingale and modelling spread of disease

• Graphing the Pharmacokinetic Profile

• How does population density affect the transmission of Ebola?

• Is the swell of the sea influenced by the temperature?

• Modelling Arctic Sea ice cover

• Modelling rainfall

• Modelling the cooling of a cup of tea

• Optimum dimensions of an aluminium drink can

• Predicting cooling times

• Rainfall compared to grape vine yield

• Statistical investigation of leaves

• The quality of local water

• The SIR model in relation to world epidemics

• The volume of an egg

• Sunspot cycles

• What is the relationship between the duration of drainage and water height in my bathtub?

Number

• Approximation of pi

• Cyclic situations and patterns through happy numbers

• e, 

• π

• π and φ, are they related?

• The golden number phi

• What is e?

• Euler’s totient theorem

People

• Assuming a person has an 85% chance of meeting a soul mate during their lifetime, what does that mean about the number of potential soul mates in the world?

• Correlation between divorce rate and financial uncertainty

• Does gender influence choice of favourite animal?

• Does the electoral college in the US truly represent the political choice of the people?

• Effect on tipping percentages

• Exploring the gamblers’ fallacy–why it can cause fatal decisions

• Is film genre choice more dependent on nationality or gender?

• Gender-based discrimination

• Left-handed students

• Memory

• Perception of time

• Relationship between a country’s human development index and infant mortality rate

• Relationship between GDP and fertility rate in countries across the world

• Relationship between income inequality and rate of corruption in a country

• Relations between international and bilingual students: jobs, pocket money and spending behaviour

• Relationship between unemployment and criminality in Sweden from 1988-1999

• Relationship between women’s secondary education and fertility rates in developing countries

• Statistical comparison of the number of words in a sentence in different languages

• The birthday paradox

• When can I use “swimmed” and “knowed” correctly?

• Voter turnout

Sport and leisure

• Baseball bat speed compared with body weight

• Body proportions for track and field events

• Does the team win when it was the dominating team during the match?

• Effective short corners in hockey

• Exploring card counting in blackjack using probability

• Factors affecting athletic performance

• Has sports performance improved more on land or in water?

• Height, weight and swimming performance

• How does the amplitude of a ski turn affect the speed of the skier?

• How far do tennis balls roll?

• The geometry involved in billiards

• Modelling musical chords

• Modelling the jump of a horse

• Practice makes perfect

• Relationship between skiing ability and distance travelled to ski

• Resistance of fishing line

• Rollerblading and the maths behind it

• The Monty Hall problem

• The Tower of Hanoi puzzle

• Video games and response times

• Will female swimmers ever overtake male swimmers?

Travel and transport

• Cost efficiency of vehicles

• Driving skills

• How many bicycles are there in Amsterdam?

• Petrol prices

• Public transportation costs and car usage: a personal comparison

• Running late and driving habits

• Seat belt use

• The effect of blood alcohol content law on the number of traffic collisions in Sacramento

• Traffic study of Schiphol International Airport

• Transport safety in town centres