foolfillment: the blog

You can help me (and my pupils) by filling in this form!

I’ve been toying with the idea of using Google Docs for a while. It is possible to get a class to populate a spreadsheet with complex data by filling in a really simple and easy form that anyone can access.

One way of using this would be a cheap interactive voting system. Another way that I was hoping to use it for was getting a sample of data so that pupils would understand anthropometrics better. I have a couple of classes who are about to design their own chair and need to understand the importance of getting the sizes of their chairs to fit the sizes of people.

Earlier today I spent a wee while setting up a spreadsheet that took data from a 5 question form and created some tables and bar charts showing the spread of hand sizes across the sample.
The form took about 5 minutes to create, and it set up the bones of the spreadsheet too. After that I set up a few extra sheets that munched up all the data and returned some graphs showing the spread of results. I fed in some fabricated data to check it was all working but soon realised I was going to need results from a lot more people than my 40 pupils for the sheets to really give a decent curve.

So, I turned to twitter and asked for people to fill in the form. As more people answer the questions the spreadsheet fills up and the charts become more refined - in real time, which is cool.

I’m hoping to find time for all of my classes to add their own data to the spreadsheet so that when it comes to the time my 2 design classes will be able to see a near perfect bell curve - and the process of gathering results.
Then I can explain the idea of using the 5th to 95th percentiles. The really nice thing is that the spreadsheet updates in real time as new values are added so I can show them the graph refining in front of their eyes.

For this spreadsheet to really make an impression though it needs as many results as possible, so please take a couple of minutes to fill in this form. Fill it in twice if you like - after all you have two hands! Now, I fully admit that this is not a scientifically rigorous experiment and that there are a lot of variables that mean the values in the spreadsheet could be wrong or inconsistent but I think this will give a reasonable idea of the spread of sizes.

This entry was posted at 7:00 pm on the 18th of May, 2008 and is filed under general, rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.