Guessing

Remember we said in the project video that statistics is about making good guesses? The GCSE lesson plan is all about this too. John has just written a BBC Magazine article about guessing and game shows which you might like to check out.

Telling the world continues!

More good news on the publishing front, we applied our methods to some curves generated by a computer using a more complex tree (shown in the picture above) and had the results published again in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Nick has a written a blog post about it here.

Telling the world - second update

Thanks for all the crossed fingers! Our other paper, explaining the maths used in the Mutating Messages project, has just been accepted by the prestigious Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This is great, as it's a journal read by all sorts of scientists - which will help get the message out to the various  places where it might be useful. So it's taken a while (nearly a year and a half from start to finish!), but the messages from The Swinton High School have been published in a scientific journal - we're thrilled that school students have been involved in the research process.

GCSE Lesson Plan - update

Great news - our GCSE Lesson Plan made it to the national level! It can now be found on the National STEM Centre website (STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), among all the other great teaching and learning resources there. We hope that a few more classes across the UK will now be playing with tree diagrams and using them to make guesses!

GCSE Lesson Plan

As the Mutating Messages project draws toward a close, we're making a GCSE lesson plan available, with a worksheet. It describes the fun lesson we had on our return visit to The Swinton High School, and enables any GCSE Maths teacher to recreate what we did.

Telling the world - update

We've had some good news - our paper on potential applications of the Mutating Messages ideas has been accepted at the well-respected journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution - you can see part of it here. Our other paper, describing the maths that we use, is waiting for a decision. While that's happening, you can take a look at it here - Figure 2 (page 7) shows some of the actual curves that were drawn during our experiment at The Swinton High School! Thanks to everyone at the School for your help, and fingers crossed that it gets accepted...

Telling the world

Now that we've done the experiment and analysis, the next job is to convince the world that what we've done is interesting. In statistics, and in science, this is normally done by publishing an article in an academic journal. A journal article describes the work we've done, and also allows other scientists to challenge it. Recently we've been working on two articles - one which describes the maths that we use, and another that discusses potential applications of these ideas. We now have to wait, to see if the articles are judged to be appropriate for the journals - we'll post an update here when we have one!