Day 17: The Mathematics of Chance: Card Games, Sampling Distributions, and Cosmic Rewind

 Hi everyone!

We started the day off with some much-needed extra sleep before heading to class. Once in class, we received an introductory statistics crash course accompanied by educational entertainment in the form of mathematical card trick demonstrations by magicians Dr. Hutson and Dr. Harris. 

Dr. Hutson began class with a card trick and an important question: What would it take to confirm that Dylan was secretly psychic? With Dylan as a volunteer, he drew 20 cards from a standard deck and prompted Dylan to guess the suit without looking. Since there are four suits in a deck, there is a 1 out of 4 probability for Dylan to guess the suit correctly, and it would take her over a 25% success rate to be considered psychic. Dylan decided not to reveal her psychic abilities and got less than the probable 25% success rate that was estimated. This was our introduction to sampling distributions.

Next up was Dr. Harris, who took the stage as both the magician and the volunteer. Based on Dylan's results, we expected Dr. Harris to perform in a similar fashion to Dylan, and have a low success rate. At first it appeared to be this way. However, by the end of his 20 guesses he had gotten a lot of them correct, and to make it even more impressive he had even predicted which ones he had guessed correctly! Something seemed suspicious, so he revealed to us that he had actually been looking at the cards before making his guesses. He demonstrated to us that if something seems unlikely, then we must look for statistically discernable evidence to form a conclusion. 

Dr. Bouzarth finished up the class by sparing us from card tricks and wrapping up everything we learned about sampling distributions. 

The Mouse program at EPCOT greeted us with rain, our last visit was met with pouring rain. Some of us were smart enough to look at the weather ahead of time and bring ponchos, others were not so lucky and got caught in the rain. Despite the weather we still made the most out of our day at EPCOT.

After wrapping up class, we enjoyed a lunch break and spent a few hours working on our designated projects before heading over to EPCOT to collect data.

Today marks the beginning of our final days in the Disney Parks, and we're kicking things off with our official last day at EPCOT. Just like how our first day of the Math and t

First at Epcot we first went to go meet Mickey Mouse and his Friends. We were lucky as the wait time to meet them was only 15 minutes! There we were all able to meet and take pictures with Mickey, Goofy, and Minnie!

After that we headed over to Guardians of the Galaxy to collect data on the song distributions, and we all had lighting lanes! This helped to save us from the 85+ minute queue due to some trouble happening with the ride. Though, these troubles still made it hard for some of us to split up into different cars, as there just weren’t enough people! Though some people even got a whole car to themselves.

Afterwards, we then split into two groups. One group decided they wanted to ride all the things that they couldn’t experience yet, such as Journey Into Imagination with Figment, Turtle Talk with Crush, and Frozen Ever after. They stopped and had some delicious food in China where they all were able to read their fortunes. They then went around the rest of the world showcase to go shopping and then watched the spectacular nighttime firework show at the end of the night.

The other group decided to go ride Mission Space, finding nemo, and living with the land. This means that Annmarie, Cassie, Dylan, and Tram rode every ride at EPCOT during this trip. They then ate at Connections Eatery just like we did on the first night. They also really wanted to ride Guardians again, even though the wait time kept on increasing all the way up to 130 minutes! In line they played lots of fun games with Dr. Harris as he wanted to join in on the fun. After the grueling wait they were rewarded with a fun ride listening to September by Earth, Wind & Fire for the last time on this trip.

After the group met up at the EPCOT ball, we had a surprise for Dr. Hutson. We created a personal Figment named after him, which was emailed to him earlier in the day. Though it was sent to his spam folder, he found the surprise very funny. 

We then went back to the hotel to rest up for another day of working on projects tomorrow.

Todays blog was written by Connor Lockett and Julia Torres!