Maths Coursework Charlotte Nellist
Our maths coursework is to present information on body measurements of year 10 and compare results to see if there are any patterns. We took six measurements. These were:
- Height
- Arm Span
- Shoe Size
- Hand Span
- Hand Area
- Head Circumference
☺ Height
Each pupil in the year had their height taken by other members of the group. They stood with their heels touching the wall and the other person would take their height with a metre ruler. The height measurements were not accurate because some girls did not take off their shoes and many girls’ shoes have big heels.
☺ Arm Span
All pupils were put in pairs and they measured the arm span against the wall, on the wall a metre was marked out. They also used a metre ruler to measure the rest of the arm span.
☺ Shoe Size
For this, instead of all the pupils measuring their feet with a ruler or finding the area of them, we just did it by shoe size. Most people used UK measurements but some people used Euro measurements so I just changed it all to UK measurements.
☺ Hand Span
For this, pupils took their own hand span themselves. We did this by getting some squared paper and spreading our hand across the page as far as we could, and then we put a dot where the little finger was and then where the thumb was. We then got a ruler and measured between the two dots, this gave us the hand span. This could be incorrect because some people have long nails, and the nails would have been included in the measurements.
☺ Hand Area
Each pupil took measurements of their own hand again. This time it was done by drawing round their hand on some cm paper. After doing this we had to count each whole square, if your hand covered more than half of the square it was counted as a whole square, but if it covered less then it wasn’t counted. This again meant that it wasn’t accurate. There was also the point about nails again; if you had big nails then it looked like you had a bigger hand area.
☺ Head Circumference
We worked in pairs for this; we measured each other’s heads with a tape measure in cms. This was not very accurate because some girls had their hair up and it got in the way. Also not many people did it.
For my coursework I decided to ask the question:
“Is there a connection between height and arm span?”
This will show if people in year 10 are square. We had a choice of what methods we could use to help answer this question. Firstly I am going to do the mean and Standard Deviation of all three groups, both male and female.
First I worked out the mean (x)
Mean = Sum of numbers
amount of numbers
Then I went though and worked out the Standard Deviation;
σ = √ ∑(x-x)²
n
Group 1 - Height
This is the bottom maths group. There are 10 females and 6 males. All these measurements are in metres.
Females
x = (1.79+1.62+1.64+1.66+1.68+1.54+1.60+1.67+1.71+1.55)
10
= 16.46
10
= 1.646
x = 1.65m
Males
x = (1.50+1.69+1.82+1.89+1.72+1.73)
6
= 10.35
6
= 1.725
x = 1.73m
When I calculated the mean it came out with 3 decimal places, so I decided to round it down/up to 2 decimal places, because that is what the measurements were given in.
