Review of SCASA’s fourth annual AP Statistics Project Competition

Southern California Chapter

of the

American Statistical Association (SCASA)

Fourth annual AP Statistics Project Competition

at City of Hope National Medical Center

Review

The Chapter’s AP Statistics Project Competition was held at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California, on May 30, 2009. There were a total of 47 entries from 7 schools in the competition that was held in a poster session format in Cooper Auditorium. Each entry, which was comprised of 1 to 4 members, was interviewed and scored separately by 3 judges. Many of the judges were professors at local universities and colleges, but there were also graduates students in statistics as well as statisticians from business and industry to round out the crew of 26. From the entries, ten were chosen as winners – each receiving a cash prize of $40 per team plus a T-shirt for each team member. The T-shirts were donated by Minitab Inc. A table of the winning entries is shown below.

Table of Winning Projects: Project Title, School, City, Team Member Names

Final Entry Number	Registered Title of Project (final title may differ)	School	City	Student 1	Student 2	Student 3	Student 4
2	Examining the Accuracy of the Windows XP Installation Time Prediction and How to Improve It	Scripps Ranch H.S.	San Diego	Samuel Carson
15	Does Birth Month Affect Test Scores?	Temple City H.S.	Temple City	Yvonne Tat	Carmen Tan
22	Predicting Hotel Room Rates Based on Occupancy	Troy H.S.	Fullerton	Cody Aros	Joyce Chuang	Stacy Suh	Emile Young
26	Movie Statistics	Beverly Hills H.S.	Beverly Hills	Michael Bina	Brenda Arianpour
28	Herbaholics Anonymous	Capistrano Valley H.S.	San Juan Capistrano	Ben Manko	Michael Best
32	The Cost of the Future	Beverly Hills H.S.	Beverly Hills	Yarden Eisenberg	Weihang Zhao
37	Shopping Trendencies	Troy H.S.	Fullerton	Lahari Surapaneni	Connie Jao	Nakia Sarad
45	Are Teenagers Now Truly The Technological Generation?	Capistrano Valley H.S.	Mission Viejo	Nicole Tague	Francis Vu
47	The Randomness of Roshambo	Troy H.S.	Fullerton	Jean Guo	Nina Gao
49	M&Ms	Temple City H.S.	Temple City	Jenny Fang	Brandon Wong	Amy Zhang	Johnny Zhou

The number of schools in the competition was 7 while the number of students was 134. The following table lists each participating school and tallies their entries and winners.

Table of Participating Schools, Number of Entries, and Number of Winners

School and Group Picture	# Entries	# Winners
Temple City	16	2
Troy High, Fullerton	14	3
Capistrano Valley, Mission Viejo	10	2
Beverly Hills	2	2
Rancho Cucamonga	2 About 20 students also participated as observers	0
Santa Ana	2	0
Scripps Ranch, San Diego	1	1

This year a formal teachers’ session was held along with the competition for the benefit of the teachers who came with their students. The teachers met in the Platt Conference Center while the students were being judged in Cooper Auditorium. The competition chairman, Rodney Jee, gave the welcome and introduction while Lee Kucera of Capistrano Valley High and Jessica Utts of UC-Irvine gave demonstrations of statistical packages Nspire and Minitab, respectively. Thanks to corporate donors, the Chapter was able to present three teachers with statistical software as door prizes. The donors were Minitab Inc., Key Curriculum Press, and Texas Instruments. Below are pictures from the teachers’ session.

Attendees of the Teachers’ Session: Lee Kucera (Capistrano Valley), top

Robert Rife (Santa Ana) and Gary Ledger (Temple City), middle left and right

Jared Derksen (Rancho Cucamonga), Daniel Zadeh (Beverly Hills), Paul Rodriguez (Troy), left to right

Left to Right, Paul Rodriguez (Troy), Jared Derksen (Rancho Cucamonga), and Robert Rife (Santa Ana) display their door prizes.

Judging was set up so that each team was interviewed for about 15 minutes by each of 3 judges. Judges’ sores were then tallied and a cut was made that resulted in 10 winners. This year the head judge was Jim Bentley of University of Redlands who prepared the team of 26 judges with a review of the scoring rubric and guidelines.

List of Judges for the 2009 Competition

Name	Affiliation
Jim Bentley (head judge)	University of Redlands
Rebecca Le	UCR
Tianran Li	FICO Corp.
Thao Duong	UCI
Jason Kramer	UCI
Shen, Jie	UCI
Brummel, Sean	UCI
Tian, Xu	UCI
Manpreet Kaur	UCI
Bud Goode	Goode Sports
Rick Cornez	University of Redlands
Carla Rother	Medtronic
Albert Lee	Molina Healthcare
Wayne Smith	CSU Northridge
Jo Service	Retired
Harold Dyck	CSUSB
Jungwon Chris Mun	Cal Poly Pomona
Annamarie Stehli	UCI
Steve Webb	Retired
Jodie Ullman	CSUSB
Madeline Bauer	USC Keck
John Gins	Fair Isaac
Jason Wilson	Biola University
Andy Dagis	City of Hope
Jeffrey Kinrich	Analysis Group
Donna Nguyen	UCI
Jessica Utts	UCI

Judges Prepare in the Assembly Room before the Competition

Table of All Entries that showed; winner’s entry numbers highlighted.

Entry #	Title	School	S_1LastName	S_2LastName	S_3LastName	S_4LastName
1	The Prevalence of Zipf's Law Throughout Time	Troy High School	Tseng	Chung	Luo
2	Examining the Accuracy of the Windows XP Installation Time Prediction and How to Improve It	Scripps Ranch High School	Carson
4	NJROTC Area 11 Competition	Santa Ana High School	Murillo	Gonzalez
6	Speed of Sight	Capistrano Valley High School	Inciong	Legg	Espinoza
7	The Correlation Between Race and Airport Security Checks	Troy High School	Chaffee	Rue	Shah
8	Does APES Help?	Temple City High School	Ma	Tian
9	Attention span from cereal	Temple City High School	Huang	Niu
10	Mac versus PC	Temple City High School	Poosangtongchai	Zhou	Wang
11	Diet Coke & Mentos	Troy High School	Guo	Chen	Lau
12	The Big Gas Test	Troy High School	Yang	Capatina	Coleman	Zheng
13	Is a swimmer's experience related to their 100 yard freestyle time?	Temple City High School	Liu	Li
14	Make me a millionaire	Santa Ana High School	Leon	Cruz	Moss
15	Does Birth Month Affect Test Scores?	Temple City High School	Tat	Tan
16	The Early Ram Catches the Class	Temple City High School	Tran	Wang
17	Spicy Food v.s Performace	Temple City High School	Kuang	Lu
18	Are girls really more culinarily inclined than boys?	Temple City High School	Randazzo
19	Growth of Bean Sprouts	Temple City High School	Hwang	Situ	Wang	Wu
20	Mentos and Cola	Troy High School	Reyes	Lim	Noor	Her
21	Determination of Antacid Deviance in Alka-Seltzer Tablets Using a Neutralization Reaction	Troy High School	Chen	Wu	Patel	Pena
22	Predicting Hotel Room Rates Based onOccupancy	Troy High School	Aros	Chuang	Suh	Young
23	Sight vs. Hearing Reflexes	Temple city High School	Leung	Liao
24	The effect of music tempo on transcription	Rancho Cucamonga High School	Guzallis	Rodriguez	Miraflor	Snyder-Eaton
25	Analysis of the NBA: Athletic Ability vs. Points Per Game	Troy High School	Shin	Lee	Park
26	Movie Statistics	Beverly Hills High School	Bina	Arianpour
27	Height vs. Span	Capistrano Valley High School	Soto	Shah	Palmer	Quach
28	Herbaholics Anonymous	Capistrano Valley High School	Manko	Best
29	Height versus Stepping Distance	Capistrano Valley High School	Chen	Nguyen	Afredi
31	Potadough Challenge	Temple City High School	Choi	Wong	Chan	Fang
32	The Cost of the Future	Beverly Hills High School	Eisenberg	Zhao
33	Do Appearances Matter?	Capistrano Valley High School	Lee	Chen	Park
34	Should Illegal aliens be deported if they have a job?	Capistrano Valley High School	Landowski	Halland	Yan
35	Are all the colors in a plain bag of M&M equally chosen among TCHS students?	Temple City High School	Ng	Mar
36	Shop Till You Drop	Troy High School	Huang	Shah	Choi	Park
37	Shopping Trendencies	Troy High School	Surapaneni	Jao	Sarad
38	Verifying Sampling Techniques on AP Scores	Temple City High School	Feng	Huang	Wen
39	Size Matters	Capistrano Valley High School	Massengale	Jacobs	Hayes
40	Arm Span: A Good Predictor of Height?	Troy High School	Chen	Liou	Peng	Sung
41	Are Capistrano Valley High School seniors smarter than nationwide seniors?	Capistrano Valley High School	Carbone	Banihashemi
42	The NBA, Where Amazing Happens?	Temple City High School	Tseng	Wang
43	Greeting responses and gender	Rancho Cucamonga High School	Kumar	Manansala	Wilde
44	The Science of First Impressions	Troy High School	Quinonez	Yu	Chang
45	Are Teenagers Now Truly The Technological Generation?	Capistrano Valley High School	Tague	Vu
46	Facebook versus GPA	Temple City High School	Tan	Kaur	Chang
47	The Randomness of Roshambo	Troy High School	Guo	Gao
49	M&Ms	Temple City High School	Fang	Wong	Zhang	Zhou
50	To test if the new Arrowhead eco friendly .5 L bottles are really 30% less plastic than other half liter bottles	Troy High School	Ho	Hyun	Basrai	Suen
51	Slam Dunk Statistics	Capistrano Valley High School	Chevallier	DeCaro	Ishii	Batesole

Head Judge Jim Bentley (University of the Redlands), right and

Andy Dagis (judge and City of Hope liaison), left.

Judges Harold Dyck (CSU-SB) and Annamarie Stehli (UC-I).

Ms Stehli also served as the Registrar for the Competition.

Judges Jessica Utts (UC-Irvine) and Bud Goode (budgoodesports.com)

Prof. Utts also gave a presentation in the teachers’ session.

Below are links to various high resolution photos from the competition. The JPEG files of photos of team members with the poster boards are named after your entry number (plus winner if you are a winner).

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry01.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry02winner.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry04.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry06.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry07.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry08.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry09.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry10.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry11.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry12.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry14.jpg

http://sc-asa.org/postercomp/PosterComp09_summaryFiles/photos/Entry15winner.jpg