Do people that play instruments have longer hands than people that do not play instruments?

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Does playing an instrument increase the length of your hand?

Introduction

        Hand lengths vary all across the world. In all genders, ethnicities, there are always people with large hands and people with small hands. What factors cause the difference in length of hands? Instrument players tend to stretch their fingers more often for example when playing the piano your fingers must stretch apart to play a chord. In this experiment we are studying whether playing an instrument is a main cause for the difference in hand size by taking measurements from the tip of the left middle finger to the wrist line.

Question

Do people that play instruments have longer hands than people that do not play instruments?

Hypothesis

 If we compared the lengths of hands between boys in the 11th grade that do and do not play instruments then the people that play instruments would have longer hands because their fingers are stretched more often.

We chose to limit it to boys to eliminate some chances of error since there is quite a difference between the size of boy’s and girl’s hands already regardless of whether they play instruments or not. We also decided to limit it to 11th graders since hand sizes generally increase with age so this would allow us to gather more accurate results. The null hypothesis is “There is no significant difference between hand lengths for instrument players and people that don’t play instruments.”

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Variables

Independent: Whether they play an instrument or not

Dependent: Hand length

Controlled: Gender (Male), Measurement Method (Ruler), Grade (11th graders), left hand only

Materials

1 Ruler for measuring

1 Notebook for recording data

1 Pencil for recording data

Method (Procedure)

  1. Gather the materials necessary to collect the data
  2. Find random students to gather data from
  3. Determine whether they play an instrument or not
  4. Measure the length of their hand from the tip of the middle finger to the wrist line.
  5. Record data and repeat on a different student.

Data processing

  1. Calculate the mean and standard deviation ...

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