Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Wire Walker Update
I finally got a picture of the winning wire walker. In the past few months many people have asked me about wire walkers and why I was working on them. They were a science project at one of the High Schools in the area and I acted as a consultant to some of the parents. "How is that fair?" you say, some children not only have their parents help them but their parents get an outsider to help.
Front and back views of the Winning Wire Walker.
The secret can be found in Freakonomics by Steven Levit. Using eight pair regression analysis on 30,000 Chicago area high school students, he found that the performance of students was best predicted not by what the parents (or schools) did, but who they were. On Average, children who's mothers were over thirty when they were born did better than children whose mothers were under twenty. Children of parents who believed in the value of education did better than children of parents who did not believe in education. Children of parents who read, did better than children with parents who didn't read. Beating your children did not make any difference. Having books in the home didn't matter (unless the parents read them). Taking your kids to the zoo (museum) didn't matter either. Isn't that interesting?
That is why I was not surprised to get the following e-mail:
Hey! Thank you so much for all your help! Our wirewalker finished in first place (3.027 seconds) no competition, and Katherine's finished in the top third. We couldn't have done it without your help!
Thanks again,
Alaina
