Form a team of four to six people. The size may be slightly bigger or smaller if the instructor agrees, but teams of size one are not teams. You will receive a packet that includes a toy and a measuring tape. Here are some examples, but your toy may be different.
| Flying saucer | Toy car with "pull-back". | Foam disc gun. |
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Please note that some of the toys are choking hazards, so take appropriate precautions if one of the members of your group is less than three years old.
Create a target on the floor or on a table at a reasonable distance so that there is some challenge in hitting the target with your toy. Each team member should get two practice attempts with your toy. Every member of the team is required to use the toy unless they are too young or too old. Do not measure anything at this point, but do try your best to get as close to the target as possible.
If you cannot get your toy to work, call your child on your cell phone and ask for advice. If this fails, ask the instructor for a different toy.
After every team member has had a practice turn, discuss what strategy you will use to insure consistent and high quality performance from each team member. You may wish to adjust the location of your target if you believe that this would help.
Repeat the practice runs, but now record how close each team member is to the target on two consecutive attempts. Use metric measurements if possible.
If any result is so bad that the results are not measurable (e.g., further away than the maximum length of the tape measure), you are allowed to "take a mulligan" that is, to repeat the run. If any team member requires more than two mulligans, write an outstanding performance review for this person and see if you can get him/her hired by a different team.
Write down the results for each team member and compute a mean and a standard deviation. Hint: when there are only two observations, the standard deviation is equal to the range divided by the square root of two (1.414).
Draw an Analysis of Means (ANOM) chart for your data. For four team members, the critical value for h is 3.889. For five, it is 3.724, and for six team members, it is 3.622.
Here is a sample example using real data. As a classroom exercise similar to the one described above, a group of three volunteers (labeled A, R, and V to protect their anonymity) were asked to take turns hitting a target with a hand launched foam rocket.
| The equipment | Shooting at the target | Measuring the result |
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Since the group was small, I asked each team member to shoot twice with their dominant hand and twice with their non-dominant hand. For each shot, the distance from the target was measured in centimeters. Here is the data (D=dominant hand, N=non-dominant hand).
A-D 14 39
A-N 60 20
R-D 26 9
R-N 9 12
V-D 36 21
V-N 53 18
The means, variances, and standard deviations are:
Mean Var Stdev
A-D 26.5 312.5 17.68
A-N 40.0 800.0 28.28
R-D 17.5 144.5 12.02
R-N 10.5 4.5 2.12
V-D 28.5 112.5 10.61
V-N 35.5 612.5 24.75
The overall mean is 26.42 and the pooled standard deviation is 18.20. The ANOM limits are
26.4 - 3.724 * 18.2 * sqrt(5/12) = -17.3 (round this to zero)
26.4 + 3.724 * 18.2 * sqrt(5/12) = 70.1
Here is a graph of the results:
Now modify your procedure, offer extra practice trials and repeat the experiment.