First we met with Mrs. Carver's Upper School Stat class. We brainstormed who we thought would have the heaviest backpack (compared to their body weight,) and how we would complete the project. We also composed a letter to send to the faculty, explaining what we wanted to do and why. We sent this as an e-mail message. Lots of teachers responded saying they thought it was a good idea.
Next, Mrs. Chauveau's math class met with Dr. Short, a statistician. (The Upper Schoolers had already met with him.) We talked to him about planning for what categories to list on our ballots when we actually weighed people. We asked a lot of good questions and he gave us a lot of suggestions too. Upper schoolers and lower schoolers conducted pilot studies.
After that, we met as often as we could and planned who was going to go to what classroom in pairs of two or threes. We were each responsible for a classroom in the upper school during Period F and we also had to cover a Lower School grade, as well as our own fifth grade classes. We also had to arrange times to weigh these classes.
Then we asked our class to bring in scales if they had
one and if they were allowed to do so. After the scales came in we went
to go weigh the classes that we were assigned. It took us about two weeks
to complete the weigh-ins in the upper and lower schools. We provided the
middle school with scales, but they weighed themselves. As the weigh-ins
wers completed, we collected the data and entered it on a Microsoft Works
spreadsheet that we accessed from the server.
After we collected all our data we once again we visited Dr. Short, this time, where he works at Villanova University. He told us about a program named Minitab. Then we came back and transferred our data onto Minitab so that we could display it in the form of different boxplots and graphs. Click here to see pictures from our fieldtrip to Villanova University.
We had lessons from Mrs. Carver and Dan W. (an upper school student) on how to find the "Five Number Summary" and on "How to Make and Interpret Boxplots." You can see our results by viewing these boxplots.
We decided that it would be interesting to do some interviews and we arranged times to complete these. Some of us also designed artwork and poetry for this website. It was a lot of work, but we learned a lot and worked well together.