fun statistics project ideas

fun statistics project ideas

Exploring Fun and Engaging Statistics Project Ideas

1. Introduction to Statistics Projects

Regardless of the class, college students might want to have statistics project help for a number of reasons, including handling data collection, statistical analysis, and understanding how to interpret data. And that’s precisely what they get. However, engaging the services of trained professionals can be inconsequential if the student doesn’t have a good statistics paper topic or some college-level examples to draw inspiration from. However, engaged professionals can provide college and high school-level students with topics that are accessible to them given their levels of training in the field. When students receive simple and readily achievable statistics projects, it could be the difference between acing that all-important statistics class and scraping through as well as flushing time and resources down the drain.

Perhaps the most important factor in college-level statistics is choosing the topic. It’s also important to remember that statistics projects can also build problem-solving skills and come in handy for people working in the business-related niche. For college-level students looking for good topics for their statistics projects, ensuring that such statistics research topics can be a bit of a headache for many students. Let’s have a look at statistics paper examples. After brainstorming for ideas, ensure that research questions can be answered. Some statistics projects might require complex data collection techniques, but a student can still pursue other statistics research topics.

When it comes to math class, students dread assignments and tests because the subjects are likely boring and dull. However, one subject that stands out from all the others and for which there are numerous interesting opportunities for students is statistics. When it comes to statistics projects, there are plenty of fun ideas to explore, or simply come up with statistics research topics of their own. Regardless of which route they choose, it’s important to note that the project is only as good as its topic. That said, here are some ideas for statistics projects that can prove invaluable in taking the class to a new and exciting level.

2. Creative Data Visualization Techniques

One of many student favorites is the Mentos and Diet Coke Project. Those of you who may not be familiar with this project most likely are familiar with the fact that when a Mentos candy is combined with Diet Coke, the liquid goes flying into the air. All the fun is in the splashing, but have you ever stopped to think about why it happens? Well, this fun, engaging project lets students explore why with data analysis. Students are encouraged to develop and then test a hypothesis that explains the physics behind why this occurs using a series of tests related to quantity and assumptions. Labeled photographs, video analysis, and graphs are all fair game when students are asked to present findings. No project is complete without a summary presentation or report, so certainly, that is included too. Dr. DeFelice has made this fun and engaging project available to all, and it’s as simple as purchasing a roll or bag of Mentos and a Diet Coke. The resulting data makes it clear that exploring complex data analysis is fun and engaging to students while reinforcing strong, active learning in the classroom. The project also incorporated an additional sled project that Dr. DeFelice constructed for measurement purposes, but other projects are wide open to investigation without the necessity of its use. Little cost, tremendous fun, and exciting to student explorers? What a great way to begin incorporating statistics and data-centric projects into the classroom!

Let’s face it – data and statistical techniques can be quite boring! But they don’t have to be. Exploring data analysis and statistics can be fun and easy through these fun projects that also encourage creative thinking and exploration. I recently talked to University of Florida math, statistics, and biology adjunct professor, Dr. Eileen DeFelice, who opened my eyes to a wealth of fun and engaging statistics projects. Eileen has a passion for engaging students in data exploration through fun, inquiry-based projects. They are a teacher’s dream – fun and engaging to students, while simultaneously providing in-depth, authentic exploration of data analysis techniques. Best of all, the projects are relatively inexpensive. Even with a price tag, there are ways to acquire many items without students or teachers experiencing a hit to their pockets. Whether you’re a teacher or a parent, these projects are easy to facilitate and sure to provide hours of engaging investigative fun, while easily covering statistics concepts typically associated with math, science, psychology, or even economics units.

3. Interactive Data Analysis Tools

The process of collecting, organizing and summarizing the data is critical for further decision making, hence the findings come out as important if the data which every group decides to work on is complex. For instance, differences to explain something related to the influence of one specific variable on another type of variable. These descriptive statistics should range from plots, correlations, regressions, tables, and hypothesis testing. However, manipulation of the data are a few statistics students may explore in order to understand business decisions. Some of them are smoothing the data, categorizing the data, investigating outliers, imputing missing data or changing the distribution of the data. Students should also be able to see real facts motivating them to apply learned statistics techniques to address a specific business problem, right from the beginning of the class until graduation.

To make the experience with a statistics project more engaging, why not incorporate the use of an online data analysis tool which produces instant results? Students can test the differences between means, joints and independent samples t tests, two-way ANOVA, one-way ANOVA, test the goodness fit, Chi-squared test, descriptive statistics such as frequency table, mean, median, mode, range or variance, correlation analysis, covariance, linear regression or simply the skewness and kurtosis. The instant feedback from the tools may motivate students to gain the most out of the online applications. Additionally, the tool is handy when visualizations on a particular type of data are needed. Its use will change the procedures of running the SPSS program, and the use of the tool does not require any programming background to obtain the basic statistics.

4. Innovative Statistical Models and Hypothesis Testing

3. Statistically Evaluating and Improving the Current Nobel Prize Nomination Process for Economics Why: Find out if the past banquet, neoclassical-only dinners are indeed justified Tools: Python, Probability Models, Hypothesis testing Data: Data acquired from the Nobel Prize Website

2. Create a Hidden Markov Model Model-based Motion-detection Network for a Surveillance System Why: Other than being something you can say to impress others with, a good motion-detection model is a valuable tool for detecting concealed criminal activities Tools: R, Python, C++

1. Introduce Heteroscedasticity into a Regression Model Why: Point to any regression fitting capacity that assumes constant variance across the fitted line Tools: R, Python, and Statsmodels to test for homoscedasticity

If none of the above stats project ideas have captivated you, you might consider pushing the frontiers of statistics itself. In this list are some of the innovative statistical models that provide unique insights or are just amusingly interesting. While some might be purely theoretical, you might be able to devise creative ways to perform hypothesis testing with them. If a stats boffin is your alter ego, these suggestions would be suitable for you. Otherwise, remember that even though these statistical methods are conceptually more difficult than other ideas, it only proves your project to be more valuable.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions

In this chapter, we described five fun and engaging statistics project ideas and some of the reasons to undertake a more creative project approach in a statistics course. Although the results were done on a relatively small sample of students in only two classes, they suggest that being creative has some potential to be more fun and engaging to the students and still achieve similar learning outcomes. In doing this, we wanted to provide empirical evidence that a more creative project approach is viable and could challenge and motivate students. We also describe some limitations of the current implementation and potential future directions for research.

In this chapter, we discuss alternative creative projects that were implemented and outcomes from the implementation. We describe how the projects were introduced and some points about the implementation process. We also compare outcomes between ‘standard’ and ‘creative’ project tracks using pseudo-experimental methods. Although the creative project track and course are novel, evidence is presented to suggest that this project-based track produced student attitudes and performance similar to the ‘standard’ project track course. A possible outcome from this result may be to include both track options in statistics courses and have learning material focused differently between tracks.