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MAT152 Mid-Semester Project Directions and Template

You will complete this project using the data that you collect from each of your survey participants. Each
question has directions to guide you as you reflect on your project and provide answers based on the data you
gathered.
The data you collect now will be the same data you will use in the end-of-semester project.

Question 1: What are the questions you will be asking participants? (Same questions approved on your
discussion board.)

● Directions: List the survey questions for your statistical study. Be specific about exactly what you will ask
people. Also, record the age of each participant. Note: These should be the same questions approved by
your instructor from the discussion board. Carry out the study. Obtain at least 20 participants for your
study.
● Tips:
o Choose questions that interest you – something different from the examples provided.
o Avoid simple “yes” and “no” questions without an explanation.
o Have participants expand upon their answers. If they answered yes, why did they do so?
o Record the ages of your participants in a table to keep your data neat!

Question #1: Do you prefer to watch movies or play video games?

Question #2: How many hours a week do you sit down to play video games?

NOTE: Collect everyone’s ages now. You may talk about them in your overall summary, but you mainly need
ages in the end-of-semester project. The focus of this project is on the questions you have designed.

Participant Age Answer to numerical Answer to non-

You will use this question numerical question
in the end-of- (s)
semester
project

Participant 1 26 14 Video Games

Participant 2 42 20 Movies

Participant 3 20 15 Video Games

Participant 4 24 20 Movies

Participant 5 50 24 Both
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Participant Age Answer to numerical Answer to non-

You will use this question numerical question
in the end-of- (s)
semester
project

Participant 6 71 0 Neither

Participant 7 23 0 Movies

Participant 8 51 2 Movies

Participant 9 27 24 Video Games

Participant 10 18 22 Movies

Participant 11 25 2 Movies

Participant 12 19 5 Video Games

Participant 13 22 10 Movies

Participant 14 18 7 Video Games

Participant 15 27 12 Video Games

Participant 16 17 2 Movies

Participant 17 24 5 Movies

Participant 18 25 30 Both

Participant 19 25 3 Neither

Participant 20 20 10 Video Games

Question 2: Who is in your sample?

● Directions: Describe who you asked.

I went around and asked 20 Del Tech students on both the Dover as well as the Georgetown campus
with my in-person classes this Fall semester.

Question 3: Who was your intended population?

● Directions: Describe the larger group you are seeking to learn about.
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The intended population or the larger group I was hoping to learn about would be the overall student body of
Del Tech, between all three campuses and virtual students.

Question 4: Do you think your sample helps you learn about your population? What could you do (if you had
more time and money) to gather a sample to better help you learn about your population? Explain in a
minimum of 2 sentences.
● Directions: In most cases your sample is probably not perfect. Tell what is good about your sample
and how it could have been improved.

I do think my sample helps to learn about the Del Tech population even though it may be just a small group
size that I’m using. That being said, If I had more time and money to gather a better sample I would probably
spend a couple of days at each of the campuses and ask more than just those peers in my class. I would
recruit my friends or some faculty to the survey as well in order to get as many responses as possible.

Question 5: Using your non-numerical (the question that did not have a number answer) data, make a pie
chart or a bar graph.

● Directions: Clearly label the information in the graph and make a descriptive title, so that it is easy for a
reader to understand what is being shown. You can do this by hand or using technology. You may need to
group similar responses to create a reasonable amount of categories
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Question 6: Describe the information shown in the graph.

● Directions: Summarize the data from the shown in the graph you made in question #5. Tell what
percentages of respondents fit into each category and describe any interesting, surprising, or
noteworthy results. Explore percentages within your data.

According to the data from the survey, 45% or 9 students that had been asked whether they preferred
movies or video games had chosen movies while 35% or 7 students chose video games. Though they
weren’t options, the 4 remaining students split down the middle with 10% or 2 stating they didn’t like either
than another 10% or the last 2 responding they liked both equally. Of those that had chosen movies above
video games, they played an average of 9 hours of games while those that had stated gaming as their
favourite played an average of 14 hours per week. The most interesting percentages that stuck out in the
results would have to be the amount of time spent playing video games by those who loved movies and
video games equally; the group spending an average of an astonishing 27 hours per week playing video
games, just about doubling the group that did respond with solely video games being their favourite.

Question 7: Using your numerical data (the question with a number answer), calculate mean, median, range,
and standard deviation.

● Directions: You can do this by hand or using technology. Show work or include the Excel spreadsheet
with formulas.

Mean* 13 hours (12.95 unrounded)

Median* 13 hours

Range* 30 hours
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Standard deviation* 9.441795

*Show work for each or include your Excel spreadsheet with formulas

Question 8: Describe the numerical results.

● Directions: Summarize the data. What are your mean, median, range, and standard deviation?
Describe these numbers in the context of your question. What does it tell you about the population?
What does the standard deviation tell you about how spread out your data is? Do these numbers make
sense given real world context?
After conducting the survey and calculating the data, the result of this survey tells me a lot of my sample
population. For the first data point, the mean or average, describes the average length of time, in hours
spent playing video games per week for all the participants combined. Out of the 20 people I asked, the
amount of time spent playing video games averaged out to be about 13 hours per week once rounded up.
Using the mean I found the standard deviation, which stood for the variation of hours played by each
student and ended up being 9.4 hours. The range in this case is the difference between the person who
spent the most amount of time spent on gaming subtracted from the person who spent the least amount of
time gaming, which ended being a range of 30 hours. Finally, in my survey the median correlated to the
amount of time, in hours, that separated the higher hours spent playing video games to those who spent
less time playing video games; the split being at 13 hours a week. The information gathered from my
questions tells me a few things about Del Techs’ population, firstly that students between the ages 24-27
spent the greatest number of hours per week playing video games compared to any other ages, with
students aged 25 playing: the highest being 30 hours. Another thing this tells me about the students at Del
Tech is that there is a slight preference towards movies than towards video games. I found it quite
surprising given the popularity of video games within the younger generation, though when accounting for
the outliers (ages 71, 50 and 42) it does make sense. With the standard deviation being 9.4, this tells me
that there are great variations in the hours spent playing games throughout the week between the 20
surveyed. This is what resulted in the higher standard deviation, if there were consistent answers the lower
the deviation would be; with 0 being no deviation at all. After reviewing all the data and the graphs created,
I do think these numbers do make sense given real world context. This is because on a wider scale, the
younger population does spend more of their free time indulging in extracurricular activities like video
games, while those of the older generation tend to spend their free time doing other things besides playing
video games.
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Question 9: Give an overall summary of your data.

● Directions: Write a contextualized summary about your data. Explain the graph(s) you created. In
words, state what your mean and median values were and what that tells you about your population.
State what percentages and ratios you found and what that tells you about your population. Use words
from the course (such as majority, plurality, maximum, minimum, mean, median, …) when appropriate.
What conclusions can you make? What was interesting or surprising? What additional questions would
you ask in a follow-up study?

For this study, I asked 20 Del tech students between the Dover and Georgetown campuses whether
they preferred movies or video games. I followed this up by asking how many hours they spent playing
video games per week. From the data I gathered from this survey, 45% or 9 of those surveyed
preferred movies over video games with 3 of them being above the age of 25. Of those that chose
movies over video games, they played an average of 9.2 hours per week on video games. This is while
the 35% or 7 that did choose video games played 14 hours a week on it. There were 2 unexpected
responses of ‘both’ or ‘neither’ with 4 responses split evenly between them who spent an average of 27
hours and 12.5 hours on the hobby respectively. The median amount of time spent according to this
survey ended up being 13 hours per week while the maximum of this survey being 30 hours, belonging
to the individual that chose ‘both’ while the minimum data point being 0 hours a week. There are 2
recorded responses of 0, one of those who chose ‘neither’ with the other preferring movies. Using Excel
I was able to determine the mode of the data I gathered to be 20 hours, with the second most said time
frame being 24 hours. From this data, I created a pie graph showing the those of who chose video
games in comparison to those who chose movies or both/neither. The green slice represents video
games, red correlating to movies and finally blue and gray going to both or neither respectively. From
this graph I was able to determine that there was no majority, with movies and video games being only
a couple of responses away from evenly split. That being said, movies do have plurality, receiving only
2 more votes than video games have. In conclusion, according to my survey, movies and video games
are about equally as popular with Del Tech students with movies having a slight edge up on video
games. Regardless of what they had chosen, all but 2 of those surveyed played at least 2 hours of
video games a week. Most of the data I discovered from this survey surprised me as I wasn’t expecting
movies to be more popular than video games, even if only by a small margin. This is made even more
surprising and interesting to me since, besides the outliers who played 0 hours, the average amount of
time per week ranged from 9-27 hours between the four response groups. If I were to go strictly by the
numerical data collected, I would have deduced that video games were more preferable than movies as
I hypothesized that video games would take majority in this survey before starting it. If I were to conduct
a follow-up study based on this survey, I would probably ask ‘How many hours do you spend watching
movies in a week?’ I would add this to the follow-up study because I think it’s important to measure how
many hours is spent watching movies because it came up as the most popular between the two option,
if only by a margin. Another question I would add to the survey would be “If you choose neither, what
do you like doing in your free time?” This is because as I was conducting the survey the first time, the
two people who replied with ‘neither’ was interested in indulging in their free-time hobbies, but I did not
have the space on this first study to include them.
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Choose 2 of the 3 Questions Below to Answer:

● Directions: Connect concepts from the semester to our project! Think critically about how you could
apply topics from the semester thus far. Use specific examples to support your answers.

Question 10: Should everyone’s responses be weighted equally? Explain in a minimum of 2-3 sentences.
I do think that everyone’s responses should be weighted equally as there is no right or wrong response to
these questions or to this study. All the responses gathered in this survey are equally as important to me in
trying to figure out whether Del Tech students prefer video games or movies and how long they spend per
week playing games. In order for me to calculate the averages from the responses, all responses must be of
equal weight or else it would be considered a weighted average instead of just the simple average I was
looking for.

Question 11: If you were to conduct your study again, explain how you would be able to apply the concepts of
absolute and relative change.
For example, if you were to conduct this survey again in five years, what changes would you look for? Be
specific to your data and variables. Explain in a minimum of 2-3 sentences.
If I were to conduct my study again in five years, I would look for either an increase or decrease in the number
of people preferring movies over video games. If movies continue to be more popular on campus than video
games, I will find the absolute change by showing the difference between the new data and old data. This is
done by subtracting the new value X to the current value of 9 in order to get the change. For example, if the
survey shows that after five years 13 people prefer movies over video games, then the absolute change would
be 4 people. In regard to relative change, if I were to calculate it after 5 years, I would take the absolute
change I found previously in comparison to the original value of 9. Using the previous example, if 4 people
were the amount of absolute change then the relative change would 44.4%

Question 12: How could you apply the probability concepts learned in lesson 4 to your data?
Give specific numbers from your data and connect to your population. Explain in a minimum of 2-3 sentences.

Rubric Goals: Use these requirements as a guide to ensure that you complete this project to the
best of your ability.
Rubric Criteria Exemplary Top Score Requirements Did I do this?
Questions are well written Questions are well-written and relevant.
Question(s) has multiple answer options
(Question 1) and/or requires explanation
Sample and population are Concept of population and sample seems
explicitly described. to be understood.
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(Question 2 &3)
Sample and population Concept of using a sample to learn about
analysis a population seems to be understood

(Question 4)
Graph of non-numerical data Concepts of creating a graph seem to be
understood. (Graph has clear labels and a
(Question 5) descriptive title; gives a helpful
representation of your data)
Data summary from graph Concept of describing and summarizing
data seems to be understood. (Data is
(Question 6) accurately described, accurate
percentages are listed, summary is clearly
written)
Calculations with numerical Calculations are accurate: All four
data measures are accurately calculated and
work is clearly shown (or an Excel
(Question 7) spreadsheet including formulas is
included).
Data summary from Concepts of describing and summarizing
calculations data seem to be understood. (Results of
mean, median, range, and standard
(Question 8) deviation are accurately reported and their
meaning in this context is clearly
described)
Overall summary Overall summary of data from your survey
questions is well done (accurately
(Question 9) describes the data, focuses on important
and interesting points, puts results in the
context of what you learned about your
population)
Connections At least 2 concepts from the semester
were accurately connected to the project.
(Question 10-12) Specific details of how these concepts
could apply to your data are included.
Professionalism Project is submitted entirely on time.
Presentation and grammar Project is neatly prepared with proper
grammar.