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Rules
To enter the Schools Statistics Project Competition, follow these steps:
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- Find a good project
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These notes form the Competition rules. Failure to adhere to these rules may result in disqualification from the Competition.
1. Determine your division
Please ensure you enter the correct division of the Competition.
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Lower secondary (Years 7-9): all team members are in grades 7, 8 or 9 at high school
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Upper secondary (Years 10-12): at least one team member is in grades 10, 11 or 12 at high school.
2. Find a team and a teacher
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Statistics competition teams should be made up of a minimum of two students and a maximum of three students all from the same school.
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All students in the team must be officially enrolled in the correct year level for the division entered at 1 July of the year of the Competition.
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Each team needs to be sponsored by a teacher in the same school as the students on 1 July of the year of the Competition.
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The sponsoring teacher must take responsibility for certifying that the students have the school's permission to enter the competition, that all team members are properly enrolled students at that school and that the team adheres to the competition rules.
3. Register your team/school
- Teams planning to enter the Competition are encouraged to register and pay their entry fee by 22 June 2012
- Registration involves completing the Registration Form (PDF 107kb) and forwarding it to the Australian Mathematics Trust
- The entry fee is $19.80 per team
- The Australian Mathematics Trust is a not-for-profit organisation. The entry fee is levied to cover the Competition’s administration, prizes and certificates.
4. Find a good project
- A good project:
- answers a question which is interesting to you and others
- answers a question which is simple and clear
- looks at something which naturally varies (eg age, height, weight, opinions, tastes, behaviours, performance, time taken, weather, etc)
- usually involves a comparison (between genders, between classes, between regions, between types, before against after, etc).
- You can choose to collect your own data: your data collection could be based on one of the project ideas provided or be your own original idea.
- You can choose to use data which already exists: your project could be based on one of the CensusAtSchool projects ideas or some other data set you find on the world-wide-web (you must acknowledge and reference your source).
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Projects should be achievable within a one month timeframe.
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The organisers reserve the right to withhold any Projects from public display at their own discretion. Any Projects which do not address the theme of the competition or which do not appear appropriate for public display will be withheld.
5. Plan your project
A proper plan is essential for successfully completing a project. Ask yourself these questions:
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What exactly is/are the question(s) of interest?
That is, be clear about what you want to find out. Be clear in your objectives, and don't be too ambitious.
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How can you obtain data to help answer the question of interest?
That is, what data do you need to answer the question posed above? What data would be useful? How can this data be obtained? What other issues may affect what you actually measure?
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Check your data is appropriate to the question
There is no point asking questions about green frogs if you can only find red frogs in your area.
6. Conduct your project
The team may obtain assistance and advice from resource material or resource people available to them. The Project should acknowledge all sources and assistance using appropriate footnotes and references.
7. Prepare your Project or presentation
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Summarise and check the data. Check that the data you have recorded are sensible, that the units of measurement are recorded (millimetres, centimetres etc). It is not unusual to find that there have been errors in recording data; try to find these errors, and either fix them if you can, or just delete these observations.
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Use statistics and graphs to analyse your data and answer your question.
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Don’t over-interpret your results. It would not be appropriate to make recommendations that would take millions of dollars to implement if you only have a small number of observations and trainee analysts. If you find something which you think could be interesting suggestions for further investigation may be appropriate.
Submissions must be electronic documents (such as PowerPoint slide shows) and adhere to the following guidelines:
- Submissions must be in either pdf (.pdf files) or PowerPoint (.ppt files) format.
- Submitted files must be less than 2 MB in size.
- Slideshows should be a maximum of eight slides.
- Slideshows should be easy to read: The minimum font size should be 30point.
- Don't overload your presentation with too much information; almost always, well-presented, simple presentations are better than presentations which try to do too much.
- Keep the layout and sequences logical
- Use headings on each slide
- Ensure any graphs and tables are clearly labelled, titled, uncluttered, easily read, and easily understood. Experience tells us that graphs are often poor, especially the default graphs produced by Excel.
- Remember the purpose of the presentation is to convey information as clearly and simply as possible: keep it simple, and keep the amount of text to a minimum. Too much text invites people to look at someone else's presentation instead.
The Project should describe the purpose of the study, the methods used, the results obtained and the conclusions drawn. You should show how your study has answered your research question.
More useful information may be found at the website for the American Statistical Association's Poster and Project Competition at http://www.amstat.org/education/posterprojects/whatisastatposter.cfm
8. Submit your entry
The School is responsible for submitting the Project to the correct location. This will probably be organised by the supervising teacher.
Remember to submit by 7 September 2012.
To submit your presentation in either PowerPoint (.ppt file) or pdf (.pdf file) format, go to the online submission page and follow the instructions to upload your file. Remember: Your file must not exceed 2 MB in size!
9. Projects are judged
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