Activity 1: Jumping Frogs

Jackson Barber and 10am-11:20am Math 1040 Class

Research Question: Which which paper, (Construction or Copier), gives us a frog that
can jump farther?

As a class, everyone made an origami frog out of either copier paper or construction
paper, the papers were distributed systematically giving each student one or the other.
Afterwards, everyone was given two practice jumps before we did the jumps that were going to
be recorded in the data. We taped a tape measurer to a table and measured how many
centimeters each frog jumped. We started the frogs with their noses right above the start of the
tape measurer, and measured from the furthermost part of where the frog landed. Everyone
jumped their frog twice and all of the measurements were put into the data as centimeters.

On average, the construction paper frog did go farther than the copier paper frogs. They
have higher mean, and as shown in the box plots, they also have a higher maximum, and
minimum than the copier paper frogs. However, the data collected from the copier paper frogs is
far more consistent and and a lesser degree of variation in their jumps. The standard deviation
with both types of paper are very close to each other as well. However there is a factor that
needs to be taken into account when looking over this data. One the most important ones being,
that not all of the frogs were created equal. I know for a fact that the frog that I had made with
copier paper was noticable worse than my fellow classmates frogs.

At the beginning of this activity, I hypothesised that the construction paper frogs would
not go as far as the copier paper frogs would. I thought this because I figured that the copier
paper would travel farther because it weighs significantly less than the construction paper.
However, my hypothesis was wrong, I think that this was due to the fact that the construction
paper was able to have more tension in the folds, which gave it addition height during their
jumps. If I could go back and change any part of this experiment, it would probably be to have
one person make frogs for the whole class, as it would get rid of the factor on how well each
frog was made, seeings how they would be all coming from the same person.

( The data for this experiment is on the following page.)

 Column Mean Variance Std. dev.

Copier Paper Frogs 19.566667 125.79747 11.215947

Column Mean Variance Std. dev.

Construction Paper Frogs 21.226667 138.12547 11.752679