Rules

To enter the Schools Statistics Poster Competition, follow these steps:

1. Determine your division
2. Find a team and a teacher
3. Register your team
4. Find a good project
5. Plan your experiment (if applicable)
6. Conduct your experiment (if applicable)
7. Prepare your poster
8. Fill in the entry form
9. Submit your poster
10. Posters are judged.

These notes form the Competition rules. Failure to adhere to these rules may result in disqualification from the Competition. 

1. Determine your division

Please ensure you enter the correct division of the Competition.   

• Lower secondary (Years 7-9): all team members are in grades 7, 8 or 9 at high school
    
• Upper secondary (Years 10-12): at least one team member is in grades 10, 11 or 12 at high school.

2. Find a team and a teacher

• Statistics competition teams must normally be made up of a minimum of two students and a maximum of three students all from the same school.
• All students in the team must be officially enrolled in the correct year level for the division entered at 1 July of the year of the Competition.
• Each team needs to be sponsored by a teacher in the same school as the students on 1 July of the year of the Competition.
• The sponsoring teacher must take responsibility for certifying that the students have the school's permission to enter the competition, that all team members are properly enrolled students at that school and that the team adheres to the competition rules.

3. Register your team/school

• Teams planning to enter the Competition are encouraged to register and pay their entry fee by June 27 2008
• Registration involves completing the Registration Form (PDF 107kb) and forwarding it to the Australian Mathematics Trust
• The entry fee is $19.80 per team
• The Australian Mathematics Trust is a not-for-profit organisation.  The entry fee is levied to cover the Competition’s administration, prizes and certificates.

4. Find a good project

• A good project:
  • answers a question which is interesting to you and others
  • answers a question which is simple and clear
  • looks at something which naturally varies (eg age, height, weight, opinions, tastes, behaviours, performance, time taken, weather, etc)
  • usually involves a comparison (between genders, between classes, between regions, between types, before against after, etc).
• You can choose to collect your own data: your data collection could be based on one of the project ideas provided or be your own original idea.
• You can choose to use data which already exists: your project could be based on one of the CensusAtSchool projects ideas or some other data set you find on the world-wide-web (you must acknowledge and reference your source).
• Projects should be achievable within a one month timeframe.
• Projects should be appropriate for presentation on a single poster and appropriate for public display.
• The organisers reserve the right to withhold any posters from public display at their own discretion. Any posters which do not address the theme of the competition or which do not appear appropriate for public display will be withheld.

5. Plan your project

A proper plan is essential for successfully completing a project. Ask yourself these questions:

• What exactly is/are the question(s) of interest?
  That is, be clear about what you want to find out. Be clear in your objectives, and don't be too ambitious.
• How can you obtain data to help answer the question of interest?
  That is, what data do you need to answer the question posed above? What data would be useful? How can this data be obtained? What other issues may affect what you actually measure?
• Check your data is appropriate to the question
  There is no point asking questions about green frogs if you can only find red frogs in your area.

6. Conduct your project

The team may obtain assistance and advice from resource material or resource people available to them. The poster should acknowledge all sources and assistance using appropriate footnotes and references.

7. Prepare your poster

• Summarise and check the data. Check that the data you have recorded are sensible, that the units of measurement are recorded (millimetres, centimetres etc). It is not unusual to find that there have been errors in recording data; try to find these errors, and either fix them if you can, or just delete these observations.
• Use statistics and graphs to analyse your data and answer your question.
• Don’t over-interpret your results. It would not be appropriate to make recommendations that would take millions of dollars to implement if you only have a small number of observations and trainee analysts. If you find something which you think could be interesting suggestions for further investigation may be appropriate.
• The final poster will be no larger than 640mm x 1020mm, single sided.
• The final poster should be suitable for hanging and any attachments should not protrude more than 30 mm.
• The lettering should be large enough to be legible to an average person from a distance of two metres.
• To make sure your poster is readable:
  • use clear fonts or legible handwriting, and ensure fonts are large enough to be read from 2 metres away
  • don't overload your poster with too much information; almost always, well-presented, simple posters are better than posters which try to do too much
  • find an interesting and informative title
  • keep the layout logical; your readers don't want to search all over your poster to find the next logical piece of information
  • use headings to separate material into smaller chunks
  • state the purpose of the study, where / how you got your data, the results you obtained, what this tells us about the answer to your question, and how you would improve your study if you had to run it again
  • ensure any graphs and tables are clearly labelled, titled, uncluttered, easily read, and easily understood. Experience tells us that graphs are often poor, especially the default graphs produced by Excel
  • remember the purpose of the poster is to convey information as clearly and simply as possible: keep it simple, and keep the amount of text to a minimum. Too much text invites people to look at someone else's poster instead.
• More useful information may be found at the website for the American Statistical Association's Poster and Project Competition.

8. Fill in the entry form

Fill in the entry form (PDF 65 kb) and attach it securely to the back of your poster. (To ensure fair judging, we do not want to be able to identify your school, the students or the teachers from the front of your poster.) Submissions without entry forms attached will not be accepted.

9. Submit your poster

The School is responsible for submitting the poster to the correct location. This will probably be organised by the supervising teacher.

• If possible, photograph your poster before you submit it—the organisers are generally unable to return posters to the schools.
• Remember to securely attach the entry form to back of the poster.
• Remember to submit by 12 September 2008.
• Ensure you submit to the correct location.
• Entries may be posted or hand-delivered.

10. Posters are judged

• The judges decision is final.
• Entries in each state/territory will be judged by judges appointed by the Competition organisers in that state/territory.
• Judging will be based on the judging criteria as advised by the Competition organisers.