One of the highlights of my middle school experience has been the opportunity to work with my peers. Although I enjoy teacher led classes, I find that I am at my best when working on projects with classmates. This is particularly true in the areas of math and computer science. One particularly rewarding group project, which I describe below, was my seventh grade Science Expo project. My middle school, Takoma Park Middle School (TPMS), places great emphasis on the Science Expo, an annual school-wide science fair in which every student is required to participate. My seventh grade Science Expo project was a computer program, written in Python, that was an extension of the classic “Six Degrees of Separation” phenomenon.
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This was in part because the experiments was based off of my sixth grade science project, which was a very similar experiment. The sixth grade experiment consisted of taking the average degrees of separation. This experiment was a experiment in graph-theory, where the average separation between pairs of students within TPMS was tested. The separation was defined as how many acquaintances it would take to meet student B from student A, where acquaintanceships are formed only by sharing at least one class. This was also in part because we both were interested in coding and math. Our experiment tested the relationship between the size of a closed group, for example a freshman science class, and the average number of degrees separating any two members of the group (a member-pair). The experiment assumed both that none of the members of the group knew one another prior to joining the group and that there were no connections, such as mutual friends, outside of the group. To solve the problem using graph-theory we generated a graph that contained each group member as a point and each friendship as a line between the member-pair. The algorithm we used to compute the result is the Floyd-Warshall all-pairs-shortest-path algorithm. The result of this algorithm would illustrate the connections between every possible member-pair of the group. The point of this experiment was to simulate the ideal size of a group which maximized connectivity between
This was in part because the experiments was based off of my sixth grade science project, which was a very similar experiment. The sixth grade experiment consisted of taking the average degrees of separation. This experiment was a experiment in graph-theory, where the average separation between pairs of students within TPMS was tested. The separation was defined as how many acquaintances it would take to meet student B from student A, where acquaintanceships are formed only by sharing at least one class. This was also in part because we both were interested in coding and math. Our experiment tested the relationship between the size of a closed group, for example a freshman science class, and the average number of degrees separating any two members of the group (a member-pair). The experiment assumed both that none of the members of the group knew one another prior to joining the group and that there were no connections, such as mutual friends, outside of the group. To solve the problem using graph-theory we generated a graph that contained each group member as a point and each friendship as a line between the member-pair. The algorithm we used to compute the result is the Floyd-Warshall all-pairs-shortest-path algorithm. The result of this algorithm would illustrate the connections between every possible member-pair of the group. The point of this experiment was to simulate the ideal size of a group which maximized connectivity between