Question

Your Task

Think of an area that interests you: sports, arts, entertainment, international relief efforts, government, careers, or the weather.

Think of a question you would like to answer. Is it better to wait until the battery is low before you recharge your smartphone? How does a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu decide which shows to offer?

Look for a website where someone already collected a large quantity of data to answer that question. While commercial big data sets may have tens of thousands of values, for this project, look for a data set with at least 100 values.

You are not going to write a program to analyze these data because you have not yet covered how to read data files. You can describe how the researcher(s) who collected the data used them to answer your question.

Answer 1

In a high school project exploring whether it's better to charge a smartphone before the battery is low, a student would research and interpret data on battery health and charging cycles without conducting data analysis themselves.

Step-by-step explanation:

When tackling the question "Is it better to wait until the battery is low before you recharge your smartphone?", a student would delve into a research project that combines elements of technology with practical application. Since the goal is not to analyze the data themselves but to understand how researchers use data to answer such questions, the student will look for a dataset with at least 100 values related to battery cycles, longevity, and charging habits. Researchers may collect data on the number of charge cycles, battery life before and after certain charge thresholds, and the overall longevity of the battery. The student can then refer to the collected data to determine if researchers found correlations between charging habits and battery health. This process involves reviewing methodology, results, and conclusions of the studies that have collected such data.

As part of a broader educational task, this project would involve data collection, understanding the variation and median values of the data, and discussing how the collected information informs the answer to their research question. After establishing the background and collecting existing data, the student could also explore the probability distribution that fits the data when considering similar future projects.