STEM Fair

Owen's last big 5th Grade project was for the STEM fair. Fortunately for Owen his desire to do a baseball related project was a perfect fit since the Nationals sponsored the STEM fair for 30 classes in DC. Fortunately for us, Owen was able to do a project that was a little more social science than hard science.

His project was on predicting attendance at Nats games. He downloaded the attendance data from all the home games in 2016 with information on date, time and opponent.  He merged that dataset with data on temperature and precipitation, and another data set with the promotion schedule. Then he created histograms looking with the number of games with attendance in different ranges color coded by month; weekday or weekend; rain or sun; hot, cold or in between; and promotions, bobbleheads, and other special games.  His big findings were that 14 out of the 15 least attended games were on weeknights in April or September, so school nights are bad for attendance. Also, the three sell outs in 2016 were Opening Day and two of the games against the Cubs.  Finally bobbleheads were a big draw, but the bobblehead game on a school night was still one of the least attended games. (And for those wondering, yes we refrained from teaching Owen how to do any regressions for this project, but he did get started with Excel ;-)

Owen placed third in his school STEM fair, and his project actually did a good job of explaining what happened next.  On a rainy school night with the Seattle Mariners in town, the Nats invited all the STEM fair winners to showcase their projects at the game, and honored the kids and teachers on the field.  As Owen could have predicted, this was a game that was destined for a small crowd, what better night could there be to give out free tickets to a bunch of young STEM fair winners and their teachers and parents ;-)

(click here for all the pictures)