STATCOM P-12 Outreach Team Participates in Spring Fest 2005

P-12 Outreach Team at Spring Fest 2005 STATCOM P-12 Outreach Team
Back Row: Adam Reeger, Ellen Gundlach,
Meike Niederhausen and Gayla Olbricht.
Front Row: Patricia Yoshida, Jianying
Zhang and Paul Kidwell.
Not pictured: Surya Tokdar
The STATCOM P-12 Outreach team participated for the first time in this year's Spring Fest on April 16th and 17th, 2005 at Purdue University. The newly formed STATCOM P-12 Outreach team is run by Statistics in the Community (STATCOM), a volunteer community outreach organization directed and staffed by graduate students in the Department of Statistics. With support from the Department of Statistics and Ellen Gundlach, the team set up several activities on the Memorial Mall at Purdue University to increase interest and involvement in statistics through the use of hands-on activities. Among this year's activities were:

M&M's graphing activity:

M&M graphing activity This activity was popular with young people. They needed to count the number of M&Ms of each color in a single bag of M&Ms Milk Chocolate candy. The goal was to graph the number of each color of M&Ms and see if it matched the description of the M&M website.



Pick 5 - Lotto (based on Hoosier Lottery's Lucky 5 game).

Pick 5 Lotto at Spring Fest 2005 This was a popular activity for people of all ages. Visitors to this tent chose 5 numbers from 1-36. Drawings were held frequently throughout the day. If you picked all 5 numbers correctly (in any order) you could choose between a $10 Barnes & Noble gift card or a fun statistics book. Picking 4 out of 5 correctly earned you a large candy bar. Picking 3 out of 5 earned you a Department of Statistics pencil. Over the two days, there were a few people who won pencils by matching 3 numbers. However, no one received prizes for matching 4 or 5 numbers. Click here to see the poster on display at Spring Fest explaining the game and the chances of winning each prize.

Age Histogram:

Age Histogram poster at Spring Fest 2005 Data were collected on the ages of the people who visited the College of Science tent on the Memorial Mall on Saturday and Sunday. Click here to see the age distribution of the 651 participants in this activity.








Why is it fun to be a Statistician?

Several posters created by the STATCOM P-12 Outreach team were on display in the Memorial Mall including their poster, "Why is it fun to be a Statistician?"

Cricket Spitting Contest:

Collecting Data from the cricket spitting contest Purdue Department of Statistics
Ph.D. Graduate Student, Ben
Tyner, collects data from
the cricket spitting contest.
Every year Purdue's Department of Entomology sponsors Bug Bowl as part of Purdue's Spring Fest. One of the activities of the Bug Bowl is the Cricket Spitting Contest. Contestants try to out spit each other with real frozen crickets. This year, graduate student volunteers from the Department of Statistics entered data and helped with determining rankings for each contest. Click here to read the Journal and Courier article about Spring Fest 2005 and to see the results of the cricket spitting contest.

The STATCOM P-12 Outreach team would like to thank all the volunteers for making the event a success!

Volunteers: Johnna Anderson, Tadd Colver, Jesse Cunningham, Professor John Deely, Elsie Grace, Nilupa Gunaratna, Ellen Gundlach, Paul Kidwell, Shannon Knapp, Andrew Lewandowski, Alex Lipka, Martina Muehlbach, Meike Niederhausen, Gayla Olbricht, Adam Reeger, Ben Tyner, Hailong Wang, Yun Wang, Lingmin Zeng, Jianying Zhang

April 2005