FLVS Science Fair 2008
This is my entry to the 2008 FLVS Science Fair. This is the 2nd annual Science Fair that FLVS through its Science Club (of which I am a member). Fair participants were required to submit a PowerPoint. I thought it would be interesting to implement my experiments through the online environment, after all, it is a Virtual School Science Fair! So with teacher permission, I sent out emails to all of my classmates explaining what they needed to do if they wanted to participate in my experiment. I received about 50 samples from 50 people and this was wonderful because my data was actually conclusive!
My Presentation Data and Graphs - Excel Spreadsheet
Things I learned
Prior to this project, I knew absolutely nothing practical about Adobe ActionScript and PHP. Furthermore, I refined my skills in Visual Basic/Excel programming.
How It Worked
Adobe Flash was used to make the experiment where people could test their reaction times and PHP was used to collect and store data from the Flash application. This was implemented rather precariously as at the time I didn't know any MySQL. The Flash Application accessed a url, passing information in the URL itself to the PHP file, like data.php?time=50,349,24,name="John" .... etc. The PHP application then did some basic handling (averaging related times) and stored each sample in a uniquely index file.