Friday, January 30, 2015

Rebecca Houston -- Minute to Win It

Over the course of the Fall Statistics Class my favorite project would have to be the Minute to Win It Experiment. Doing this experiment was fun because we got to decide what experiment we wanted to do and we got to test people ourselves. I also learned the most during the course of the Minute to Win It Experiment all because of the paper that we had to write after we did all of the experiments. 

Writing the paper taught me how to correctly use p-value, difference in means, null and alternative hypothesis, and it helped me realize the power of numbers in statistics. I learned what numbers were valuable and I learned what values were statistically insignificant. This project also taught me a lot of inconsistencies and errors. Before this project I always believed that you could have an experiment happen with very few errors. This is a fantasy, I learned just how difficult it was to have a "perfect" experiment. It is incredibly difficult, even though this experiment was only contestants moving a cookie from their forehead to their mouth, the data that we retrieved and the errors that we noticed were incredibly complex for such a simple experiment.

I enjoyed this experiment because it was the most fun and I learned the most. This project was the most applicable project that we did all semester because we applied what we were learning to a project that we completely in charge of. This project was the highlight of my statistics class.