Practice Experimental Design
For the following scenarios, list at least three variables that should remain the same, the variable that should change, the independent variable, and the dependant variable.
A certain hot dog company wanted to know how much rat meat they could put into their hot dogs with out people noticing a funny flavor. The head chef made a batch of 100 hot dogs made with rat meat and 100 hot dogs made by using their regular recipe.
At a recent baseball game, the hot dog company set up a booth where they gave people free samples of each type of hot dog. The people’s reaction to each type was noted and from this data, the company was able to determine if the would be able to market the new hot dogs.
A drug company wanted to test a new drug aimed to help bald people grow new hair. They recruited a group of 300 bald men and separated them into two groups. One group of people was given a sugar pill called a placebo but was told that they were taking the new medicine. The second group was given the medicine. Once a week for a year, each person was asked to come into the clinic and any new hair growth was noted. At the end of the trial, the drug company was able to determine whether or not the new drug worked as expected.
A well known computer hardware company was developing a new high-speed computer chip that they hoped would revolutionize computing. In order to test their new chip they placed it into a computer and ran a number of operations while timing the amount of time it took to complete each one. They then ran the same operations on a computer with the old chip installed and measured the amount of time it took that chip to complete the tasks. After the trials were complete they were able to determine if their new chip was really better than the old one.