Winter Reflection
Throughout this year in statistics there have been numerous projects that have taught me skills that I could use beyond school, but I think the best skill that I have learned is how to make a Google Docs Spreadsheet work for me, essentially making any workload easier to manage.
In the beginning of this project I didn’t know much of anything about Google Docs Spreadsheets, in fact I would say the extent of my knowledge was the ability to input numbers and words to make an organized spreadsheet. Throughout the next few weeks I learned many things about the program; those ranging from how to find the sum of a column all of the way to how to write a conditional statement to make the spreadsheet essentially think for itself.
Surprisingly, I didn’t find this to be too difficult to accomplish. When it was first being described by our Kyle I was expecting to struggle to understand the concept and how it worked, but once I dove into the content itself I realized that my fears weren't based upon anything.
As I said before, this skill can go far into the future, even helping me beyond my academic math classes. What this skill can do for me in the near future, however, is to help me organize any data that I may find while doing research in math later in the year. It can also help me organize data that I may find in the field during geology in the coming semester. The data could be simple numbers, but it could also be something like tallying how many of something I may find. The possibilities for this skill are endless.
In the beginning of this project I didn’t know much of anything about Google Docs Spreadsheets, in fact I would say the extent of my knowledge was the ability to input numbers and words to make an organized spreadsheet. Throughout the next few weeks I learned many things about the program; those ranging from how to find the sum of a column all of the way to how to write a conditional statement to make the spreadsheet essentially think for itself.
Surprisingly, I didn’t find this to be too difficult to accomplish. When it was first being described by our Kyle I was expecting to struggle to understand the concept and how it worked, but once I dove into the content itself I realized that my fears weren't based upon anything.
As I said before, this skill can go far into the future, even helping me beyond my academic math classes. What this skill can do for me in the near future, however, is to help me organize any data that I may find while doing research in math later in the year. It can also help me organize data that I may find in the field during geology in the coming semester. The data could be simple numbers, but it could also be something like tallying how many of something I may find. The possibilities for this skill are endless.
In this document if you look at column C you will find a conditional statement. This statement is saying that if the number in column B is less than 2, an "x" should appear in column C. If the number is greater than 2 in column B than the number that is in column A should appear in column C. This statement, although sounding simple, took me some time to understand how it worked.
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First off, this document is extremely confusing. This is something that I created alongside 5 other students over the span of about 2 weeks. The conditional statements in this are much more complex than in the first document. The conditionals in this don't have to evaluate one number, but rather multiple numbers added together to equal a certain amount. This certain amount may lie in the middle of one of the sets of data, which is what made this spreadsheet the most difficult thing I have done in statistics. Even with 6 students in total thinking this through, it took us hours to figure out a single conditional statement that could be used to accomplish this task.
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