The Second Step: Moving Forward

For the past three weeks we have been making a lot of progress on our project. We researched our topic and created a table with all the information we found. We talked about the do’s and don’t’s when it comes to dealing with stress and chose a few techniques that we thought would be interesting to test. We then made a survey with the options that we chose and asked people which methods they thought would help the most. They chose five out of the eleven methods that we listed. When we checked the results, we saw that the top five responses were exercising, not procrastinating, being organized, writing everything down, and communicating. Because these were the most popular responses, we are going to test these methods on the individuals participating in the experiment. 

While working on this project, we have not only learned how to organize our data so that it is easier for others to analyze, but also gained a better understanding of the techniques we want to use in our experiment. Right now, we are testing out the method of exercising for thirty minutes daily to see if it actually helps manage stress better. Kaitlyn is doing gymnastics, Veda is attending badminton, Esha is playing squash, Akshat is playing soccer, and last but not least, Rachel is playing volleyball. 

Although we did not have any setbacks, a minor issue we encountered was finding people with both busy and laid back schedules. To handle this, we asked a couple of our friends to tell us what activities they participate in and how many hours of free time on average they have during the day. With this, we can find out how busy a person's day is. Throughout the past week, we have gotten a deeper understanding on the methods we are planning to use. 

Looking forward, we are going to give our experimenters new ways to deal with stress every other week and record their results. Everyday they will use that specific technique and answer a survey to rate how well the method they used actually worked. We can apply what we have learned by using it when we see stressed kids or adults. We could simply walk up to them, tell them a helpful method about dealing with stress, and give them advice that we learned from our research.