I just completed a project about surveys and statistics, causation and correlation, and a lot of numbers. I did this project with Max and Sylas, go check out their blogs. This project was titled “Correlation vs Causation” and is just that, our goal was 2 find 2 correlations and a causation by surveying people questions that would get us answers.
Correlation is when you have variable A and B on a graph and they follow the same route across the graph, but not because A causes B vice versa. (E.g. an increase of Autism diagnosis’ at the same time as an increase of vaccinated people, this correlation was caused by variable C not shown on the graph).
Causation is when variable A does cause B or vice verse, there was no third variable. (E.g. increase of age causes increase of height).
This is actually the answer to this projects driving question: “How are correlation and causation different?”
I created a MindNode to write down any questions, ideas, or information I had on the topic:
A big part of making these graphs was the use of numbers, to get us familiarized with Numbers and a type of graph called a scatterplot. We wrote down everyones height and hand size to see is there was any correlation. There was a positive correlation:
The next milestone was our Survey Plan. We decided to make our survey about how students are stressed with homework over the weekend. What we aimed our correlations and causation to be changed, however that was always the main topic. We had to come with 10 questions, figure out what our population was, and our sample.
A population is defined by the group of people you are studying, for us it was Seycove students. A sample is defined by how you surveyed the people, for us we did a voluntary sample because we didn’t want to force people to do our survey.
Throughout this project we had been revising, adding and rewording questions to our survey so we got a lot of uneven answers.
Milestone 5 was the presentation outline. Just a small pages document to plan out what was going to be in our keynote presentation.
We then had presented our actual keynote in milestone 6. We showed our graphs and proved our 2 correlations and our causation. I wasnt all too prepared and forgot a lot of presentation etiquette, could’ve gone better, here were our 2 graphs:
This was a fun but also stressful project, we changed our focuses a lot during class I forgot what we were trying to do, I think we managed to pick it up and make it coherent though. Numbers is now haunting me, see ya.