Mathematical Studies IA

[Illbatting]

We are soon to begin working on our project works in Mathematical Studies (an area which i'm unfortunatley not that comitted to). We are firstly however, going to decide upon what our project is to be about.

It has to include some kind of problem, a research question, data collection and of course mathematics... sophisticated mathematics.

I am totally confused about what I would like to deal with. Our teacher told us to choose to work within a topic/area that we like. I am in to Video Games (PC mainly) and I know that there probably are loads of problems to deal with within the world of gaming... my problem though, is that I do not know where to start looking.

I am all ears on ideas, thoughts and suggestions that will help me get going with this project. Everything is accepted and if you do not think that Video Games is such a good area, then please be sure to give other suggestions that will help come up with something!

Thank you!

[Mahuta ♥]

Well think about who do video games affect? and in what way?

[sweetnsimple786]

In bio, we were discussing how to get a heart attack (pretty interesting list, let me tell you), and "not dealing with stress well" was one of the factors.

Our teacher said that many people get away from homework by playing video games, and this is one of the worst things to do because most require some level of competition and/or violence. The person is so concentrated and stressed that his/her blood pressure rises and there are other distinct, measurable signals.

If you're into that kind of thing, it would make an interesting research project. You could try to correlate the type of game with the level of stress indirectly through adrenaline levels, etc. Or you could look at different types of people and how stressed they become playing a competitive video game.

[hrdk]

I am also stuck with the same problem!

[Vvi]

My topic came to me as I was sitting in Math class, staring at the blank whiteboard. I just had a brainwave, asked the teacher right then if my topic was good and he said yes. I don't know how many people that happens to, but you can hope it's you. Think of the area from all directions, especially simple ones. Most people try to do things people ahve never heard of before, but simple topics are often the most effective. One girl did hers on competition between restaurants selling Middle Eastern food (don't remember exactly what aspect), and she did better than someone else who tried to find certain types of geometric patterns in Islamic art (although she may just have approached the topic badly).

Mine was "At what age do height differences between the sexes appear?" I got full marks on mine, but I think that was due to the fact that I did all kinds of mathematical things (worked out mean, median range, analyzed which one was the best to use in measuring average height, calculated Pearson's correlaton coefficient, drew lots of graphs of Excel comapring boys/girls heights and I did a t-test which goes beyond Math Studies). Most of my classmates did the Chi-Squared test. You should aim to have at least one complex operation in your IA (like the t-test or Chi-Squared test), otherwise your IA is too simple (my teacher told many people in my class to change their topics for this reason, and all of us got 15-20 on our IA's after we did).