When will Ctrl-Z win a Chairman's Award?!
Analysis by Nathan Petersen, member of Ctrl-Z, during the Summer of 2015.
Background
At every regional competition, many awards are given out to different teams. All teams strive to win the Chairman's award. "The most prestigious award at FIRST, it honors the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST." Ctrl-Z has never won a Chairman's award at any competition since the team started in 2012. This project investigates what the mean age of a team is when they win a Chairman's award.
Disclaimer: All analysis is based on statistics. A FRC team can win a Chairman's award at any age.
Hypothesis
Looking at all FRC teams that have won a Chairman's award, assume their ages upon winning are normally distrubuted. From this, one can calculate when a team is most likely to win a Chairman's award by constructing a confidence interval.
Data
These numbers are the age, in years, of an FRC team that won a Chairman's award, going back to when FRC started in 1992.
All data from The Blue Alliance.
Visualization
Analysis
Estimating a confidence interval for the mean age of a team when they win a Chairman's award.
T-Interval at the 90% confidence level
- Data is taken from a SRS
- Sampling distribution contains a large sample, so normality does not matter because T-Interval is a rugged interval.
We are 90 percent confident that the mean age of a Chairman's award winning team is between 7.219 and 7.751 years.
Conclusion
Looking at the histogram, the center appears to be between 5 and 6 years. This is the age at which most teams win a Chairman's award. The dip in number of winning teams at year 7 shows an interesting trend: teams do not work as hard after winning a Chairman's award. The histogram is skewed to the right, showing that teams continue to win Chairman's awards even as they reach mature ages.