A family potluck picnic is a great opportunity to have a contest
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 such things as different kinds of juices, peanut
butter, or ice cream. The food could also be different people’s
homemade pie, baked macaroni and cheese, or dumplings. As he figures
out what foods and/or brands he wants people to taste, he should aim
for three different choices.
Then your child needs to determine a scale for collecting people’s
opinions. He could ask people to rate each item from 1 to 10, as in
Olympic scoring, or simply ask people to choose from yucky, okay,
or delicious (or other descriptive words that he thinks will work
well). Your child also needs to figure out a system for recording
the information and then displaying the results in a graph. If your
child wants to announce the winner at the picnic, he should figure
out how to display the results beforehand.
There are many different ways your child can display the data he
collects. 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)
can also make the winner clear.
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 up the values of 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.
