Hypothesis 2: I think that girls will be better at estimating than boys estimate as girls are normally more careful then boys. They will probably take more time to estimate, so there estimate will be more accurate.
Hypothesis 3: I think that older people will be better at estimating as they will be wiser and more familiar with estimating lines and angles.
Method (continued): I gathered all my results then typed them out on the computer so it could work things out for me. Here are my results:
I have included an absolute value of percentage column in my table so I could work out the percentage error correctly. If I just used the percentage error my results wouldn’t be accurate. This is because if people guessed below then a minus sign was in the column. These minus signs would cancel out some of the positive numbers when I was working out the average.
I then did two graphs for the percentage error of the line and the angle:
I can see from these graphs that someone did actually estimate the angle correctly. This was a shock to me as it goes against my hypothesis that it is easier to estimate lines than angles.
Many people were close to zero for both the line and the angle. But I didn’t think these graphs were very useful as they had different scales so visually they weren’t very accurate.
I worked out the range for both the line and the angle percentage error:
Line: 129.4
Angle: 60.7
This supports my first hypothesis, but as it is clear from the graphs there were a few anomalies from both the line and the angle estimates. This could have made the range in accurate.
I have done both the results on one graph as well so can see which ones were closer to zero with them both on the same scale:
I supported my hypothesis further by calculating the average percentage error for the angle and the line. I did this by using the absolute value columns in my table, here are the results:
Line: 18.2
Angle: 14.0
As you can see the average percentage error for the angle was lower than the average percentage error for the line. This does support my hypothesis further and proves people do find it easier to estimate angles than lines.
I think the person who estimated the line correctly was just lucky rather than skilled because the line wasn’t a whole number so it shouldn’t have been easy to estimate. However, it was a simple decimal with it being 5 which is a sensible decimal to estimate.
I don’t think that the angle wasn’t very easy to estimate either as I put it on a slant so that it would be harder to work out 90°.
