A family potluck picnic is a great opportunity to compete for the
best of a particular food, and your child can run it!
First have your child come up with a food that she can use in the
contest. She might use different kinds of juices, peanut butter, ice
cream, homemade pie, baked macaroni and cheese, or dumplings. She
should aim for three different choices of foods or brands that she
wants people to taste.
Then your child needs a scale for collecting people’s opinions.
She could ask people to rate each item from 1 to 10, or simply ask
people to choose from yucky, okay, or delicious (or other descriptive
words). Your child also needs a system for recording the information
and displaying the results in a graph. If your child wants to announce
the winner at the picnic, she should figure out how to display the
results beforehand.
There are many different ways your child can display the data.
A line graph or bar graph for each type of response will show all
the votes at once and will let people compare the results. A graph
that organizes all the choices together in some way (such as a bar
graph where each bar shows the total score for each food) would also
work.
Regardless of the graph used, your child needs to determine a way
to decide on the winner. Is the winner the item with the most top
votes or are all the votes considered? Can a “yucky”
vote count against an item? If people use numbers to rate an item,
then the numbers can be totaled and then averaged to find which item
has the highest average score. Or, the winner could be the item that
gets the most 8’s and above. A scale of yucky, okay, and delicious
can be converted to numbers. For example, your child can use the following
scale:
 | |
|
| Yucky = –1 |
| |
|
| Okay = +1 |
| |
|
| Delicious = +3 |
Your child can then turn all the votes for a food item into a single
number by adding the values for each vote. The winner is the one with
the highest number. Of course, the winner could also be the one with
the most delicious votes.
