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!

Our school report

Now we know what people thought of us! Today we looked at the feedback forms from our visits to The Swinton High School. We thought about how to present the information in an interesting and accessible way, and decided to use pie charts and tag clouds. Statistical graphics like these have an interesting history - did you know that Florence Nightingale was one of the pioneers?

The pie charts cover these questions:

• Would you recommend this sort of activity to other students?
• Do you think that the Mutating Messages project has changed your attitude towards Statistics?
• How much Statistics do you think you learned from the session?

The moment of truth

We now have the results! They look a bit like this:

The solid black curve is the computer's best prediction of the original message. But we can't be sure!

Starting the analysis

We've started analysing the curves from Team 2's iPads, by writing a computer program (in a language called MATLAB). Here's part of it:

Team 1 - warmup exercise

As a warmup, Team 1 passed a drawing of a crown along the tree-shaped network. The original message was:

A first question is 'in what ways is the message mutating?'. Answering this is important if we want to do statistics on the data. Does it change size? Or change position? What about the number of points? Do different things happen on different branches? Here are some videos of the mutations along each branch:

Project video finished!

The team at Activideo have been working very hard putting together all the footage from the experiment, and now the project video is ready! It explains the whole project, with graphics and music.