Mad Scientists

We went to our first science fair as a family this past weekend. Mary and her friend Abby decided to enter a project this year. Their question (which they came up with on their own) was "Which liquid in our house weighs the most and which weighs the least?" They hypothesized after looking at all of the liquids they could find that the corn syrup would be the heaviest and that water would be the lightest. So they measured an equal amount of each liquid and weighed them on a little scale. Sure enough the corn syrup was the heaviest. To their surprise however their milk weighed just a bit less than the water. It is unclear to me whether there was indeed a statistical significance between the weight of the corn syrup and the rest of the liquids (I think they were still working on their z-scores and p-values).

Regardless of their shakey statistical methods, they explained their project well to the three judges and were awarded a 1st-place blue ribbon for their efforts.

The remainder of the science fair (made up of first through sixth graders) was terribly interesting. There were at least 5 groups who studied the effects of mentos exploding when dropped in various bottles of carbonated sodas (something Borries kids likely did as youngsters), there were multiple "which carpet cleaner works the best?" projects, and several looking at the effect of different music styles on heart rate (punk rock seems to be the type that raises HR the most.) By far the most interesting project to me, however, was the one measuring the most likely first move in rock-paper-scissors based on sex and age. You will be interested to know that both younger and older males tend to lead (60% of the time) with a rock whereas the majority of females lead with either paper or scissors. Hopefully this helps the next time you are challenged to a game.