Optical Illusion Investigations

We have been looking at different optical illusions. We were interested in how different people in the class might perceive these optical illusions and our statistical questions.

We made up questions and put them next to the optical illusions. Then we all went around the classroom and placed a tally mark for our answers.

Some of the illusions Mrs Walker asked the questions and we sorted our answers because the optical illusions could be percieved really differently and there were too many responses to make just a few categories and some people saw more than just one thing. We had to make categories from the responses.

To do this we each used a piece of paper to place on the carpet a bit like a pictograph. This way we could add as many pieces of paper as each of us needed.





Then we worked in groups to make our own pictographs.
The groups displayed the data in ways that made sense to them. We talked about why we need to make graphs, to visually communicate the data to others.














Then Mrs Walker taught us to use the app Numbers on the i-Pad (like excel). In our groups we made a table with our data for the Mexican's illusion. We made bar graphs using these tables, some groups played around with the app and made all sorts of graphs. Estee's group tried to make a 3D bar graph but some of the categories were not showing so we decided it wasn't a good one to communicate with other people. We talked about changing the values on the axis so that these made sense. If we didn't change the values, some of the values were decimal numbers. We knew we couldn't have this as our data represented people and we couldn't have 4.6 people. We had lots of laughs about some of the values that we had to fix.