Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

The Effect of Age on a Person's Pulse when Playing Different Sports
Is this too much of a survey?
Would it even count as a survey?
Here's my proposed plan:

The Effect of Age on a Person’s Pulse while Playing Different Sports

1. Let 5 people in each age group (10 - 20, 25 - 35, etc.) compete in the same sport.

2. Before competting, measure their pulse.

3. After 5 minutes record the pulse of the people.

4. Repeat steps 1 and 2 on different sports such as soccer, basketball, tennis, running, and etc.

5. After 10 sports, find rational percents proportional to the ages and pulses.

Please Help!!!
Thanks for all Help:!:

Dear Leon:
Sounds like you have chosen a very nice topic for your research project. The survey can provide information based on the criteria that you set forth in your experiment. You have to ponder age, gender, and type of sport. For example, you might consider using the male, at 10 year age intervals and a specific sport activity in order to gather your measurements. You have a lot of flexibility within this assignment to design a specific experiment.

Yours truly,
Janelle

If you simply put all of these people on a soccer field and ask them to play, your data will be so noisy as to be inconclusive. You need to heve the experimental subjects perform activities that are as exacltly alike as possible, so that you have only one independent variable. Otherwise you would have many:
time actaully playing
distance run
average running speed
time standing around
times kicked ball
etc.

This is why doctors have expensive equipment with treadmills controlled by computer, so that running time, speed, distance, slope, etc. can be practically identical among patients and the results can be directly compared.

I suggest you use a treadmill at a gym, and have each person jog on the exact same program or setting. Then you will have meaningful results and you will very likely have good quality statistical results come out.

5 people per group is a good number, by the way, if you are limiting yourself to one gender. Otherwise, each gender should be equally represented in each age group, and you should have 5 of each gender in each age group. This can add further problems, such as how soon after eating did the test occur, what time of day, etc. You should record these observations for each subject so that you can do statistics on them as well.

Don't worry, you will never get it perfect, nobody ever does unless they test thousands of patients. Good luck, you will learn a lot with this project!