March Post 1

As mentioned in the last post, I am ready to begin my experiment!

I first sent out an email to all students with a link to sign up to do my experiment. However, only 1 person out of 350 signed up. So, we thought of other ways to ask people. I thought of asking the 9th grader STEAM students. I came into their meeting to tell them about my experiment. 3 people out of this group signed up. Although the number of participants is quite small, I started my experiment the weekend before spring break. 4 students came in on a Saturday morning, and ate either fast or slow burning food. Then, they came back in an hour to take the short quiz. It went very smoothly. I am excited to continue part 2 of my experiment. 

My next step is to continue to find more people to do my experiment. I think I will approach my friends as well as their friends' friends. My goal is to have 12 participants. (right now I have 5) I will also be working on my bibliography. 

February Post 2

We spent the last 2 weeks planning on our experiment. We first decided to send out a survey to students to find out more about current breakfast eating habit. Results has shown that about 90% of the students eat breakfast. Half of the student body eat bagels with cream cheese. Egg is the second most popular breakfast food.

My experiment is fairly straightforward.  I will invite one group of students on a Saturday morning, and have them eat either fast burning food or slow burning food. A list of choices will be provided. Then, they will come back in an hour and take a quiz that measures their mathematic and vocabulary skills. They repeat this on another Saturday, but they will eat the other type of food. I will measure how well students did on the quiz eating fast burning food compared to eating slow burning food.

Since my quiz is on math and vocabulary, I took some sample questions from the SAT website and created two similar quizzes. I asked my math teacher and english teacher to see if the two quizzes are equivalent.

My next step is to find students to do my experiment!

January Post

A lot of time were spent researching about topics, coming up with ideas, drafting a outline and more. I was first interested in psychology and came up with two topics, social conformity and decision making. Then, as I was doing more research, I find nutrition and how it affects our brain interesting. I started narrowing down my topic, and focused on specifically how the nutrition in breakfast foods affect academic performance. I then started paying attention to what students eat for breakfast at the dining hall and made some observations. I started categorising food groups, such as fast burning foods, and slow burning foods. I found on a website that eating slow burning foods will help you do better in mathematic and vocabulary skills. To prove this theory, I started to plan an experiment to test if fast or slow burning foods does impact one's mathematic and vocabulary skills. I really look forward to the results!