About the Calculator

This feature, like many math and science features on this site, exists because Professor Puzzler wanted his own students to have access to the tools quickly and easily. In this case, the Professor wanted his high school physics students to have access to an "outlier" calculator.

Why? Let's suppose the Professor's students are measuring how long it takes a ball to roll down an inclined plane. They are using a stopwatch, and plan to take multiple readings, which they will then average. Most of those readings will be in the vicinity of 2.5 seconds, but they might have one that's 5 seconds. It is not uncommon for high school science teachers to tell their students, "If you have one value that is obviously absurd, chuck it, and average the others." Why do teachers tell their students that? Because many high school science students have not yet a statistics class, and therefore can't calculate the outliers.

The problem with this is, of course, that if we give experimenters the option of "eyeballing" which numbers aren't reasonable, they can deliberately skew their own results toward the value they want to obtain. A mathematical approach is needed. And the mathematical approach exists, even if the students haven't learned it yet. So you can send your students to this page to determine their outliers (and, along with that, of course, the values which are not outliers).

Bookmark this page, share it on your school website, or your teacher blog, and encourage your students to use it in their science classes!