Statistics Enrichment Camp 2017

Introduction

This project was used in a Statistics Enrichment Camp at NUS in June 2017. The participants were from various secondary schools and junior colleges in Singapore.

For my activity, I intended to show them some of the considerations that a statistician has to make. Here’s how the activity went:

  1. At the beginning of the day, some students were randomly selected to perform a mock crime. They were pulled aside from the main group and asked to read through the following document. Some of them were assigned to the role of truth-teller and some to the role of liar.
  2. Depending on their role, they were told to go into a room and perform the crime – either to remove a toy and hide it on their body (liar), or count the number of toys (truth-teller).
  3. During the actual activity, these students were tested using a heart-rate recorder built using an Arduino. This was the testing script that was read to them as part of the test.
  4. Here is a document that describes what happened. It can be used to brief the students just prior to the testing.
  5. A debriefing was conducted using the following slides.

Arduino set-up

Electronic components used

  1. Arduino Uno
  2. Seeed Grove heart rate sensor
  3. 3 x LEDs
  4. Jumper cables/leads
  5. 4 resistors – 220 Ohm, and 3 110 Ohm resistors
  6. 1 push-button switch

The components were connected in the following way:

Software used

  1. R and shiny. The data collected was analysed using this shiny app. You can try it out with this example dataset. For the smoothing of the heart-rate, the Tukey 3R smoother was used.
  2. The Arduino code is available from my bitbucket account page. My bitbucket id is singator, and the repository name is stats_camp. If you cannot find it, please do not hesitate to email me to get it.

I do hope the students found it interesting 🙂