Group 19 - What do you taste?

3/8 today we picked our project. In our experiment we will be dying lemonade red to look like koolade and observing what flavor people say it tastes like. People should say it tastes like cherry or strawberry while it is just plain old lemonade.

3/9 today we started researching similar experiments to the one we plan to preform. We took notes on the different websites and they were very helpful. Here is a link to the best one we found https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/coltaste.html


3/10  Today we Finished our background research and our summery of the background information. According to all of the sources we found when the color of the beverage is altered, people should taste what color of the beverage is, and not what flavor. For example, if we dye lemonade red, people should claim they taste cherry or strawberry instead of lemon or lemonade. This is because people have learned to associate certain colors with certain flavors. We plan to test if this is true.

3/11 Today we developed our hypothesis and identified our variables. Our hypothesis is, most people, if given a flavored beverage with coloring to change its appearance, will taste a different flavor. Then our independent variable is drinking the beverage with altered color, and the dependent variable is people believing that the taste of the beverage has changed. Our constant variables are the brand of the tested beverages, and the amount of the beverage given to people. Lastly, we will not be having a control group in our experiment.
3/14 Today we planned out how our experiment will work during the fair. We plan to test at least 560 people! People should not be hard to draw over to our stand because many people like free drinks, and just in case we are going to bring candy for participants. We will be testing people of all ages and genders. We will be measuring the amount of people who got the flavor of the drink wrong. We will do this by making a chart and keeping track of what flavor each person claims the drink is. Each participant should take 30 seconds to 1 minute of our time. This should not be a problem because we can run the experiment in groups of people. Two of us will test the experiment on people while the third person keeps track of the data. One thing that we figured may interfere with the experiment is that people find out what we are testing and tell their friends about it because it can ruin our data.

3/15 Today we started to combine all of the work we have been doing into handout number 18. We fixed parts of are research paragraphs that were cited incorrectly and made them into better paragraphs. We added our hypothesis and explained it, and condensed our procedure of what we will do during psychology fair. Most of today was getting all of our information in one place.

3/16 Today we finished handouts 19 and 20. We decided on all of the materials that we needed, and if our stand needed electric outlets, which it does not. We also decided what we need to buy to in order to run our experiment. We need to buy a 3 fold poster board, a jug of kool-aid powder, a jug of lemonade powder, small disposable cups, and red and purple food dye. All together It should cost between 15 to 17 dollars.

3/17 Today we made a google form for our participants to fill out. It asks them what the flavor of drink #1 is, what the flavor of drink #2 is, what year in high school they are in, and what gender they are. This will be helpful to finding our results because it will make a graph for us and can transfer information into sheets for us, so our data will be organized.

3/18 Today we started to work on our poster board. We found pictures online of the kool-aid man and other things to make our poster look good. We also brain stormed what we would write on our poster.

3/21 Today we started working on our poster. We are making large visuals to try and attract people to our booth. We drew a large face on the left flap looking at a glass of Kool-aid on the right flap. Finally we have our title in the middle. 
3/22 We continued to work on our poster. We added color to a lot of it and started to put tons of information on it. We added our hypothesis, some of the research we found on it, and how we will test our hypothesis. Unfortunately we did not finish our poster in class because it is very large and requires a lot of work. Otherwise, parent night is tomorrow night and we will get to test our experiment out on the parents of fellow students. If our experiment does not work, we will have only the rest of that night to figure out what we are going to do to fix it, but hopefully that will not be the case.
4/23 Today is parent night at our school, so we are running our experiment on the parents. so far it is working out pretty well. The red colored lemonade flavor is being guessed the most, but the green colored orange flavored kool aid (we could not get it to a purple color) is fooling everyone. From what we have seen from the parents, this experiment works. We cannot wait to try it out on all of the students tomorrow!

4/24 Today is Psychology Fair! we are going into the last class hour now and so far our results have been well. One thing we learned it to not let participants smell the drink because they sometimes smell out the flavor. Some people get the red lemonade wrong, but a lot get that one right. The one that fools almost everyone is the orange kool aid dyed green, people say kiwi and watermelon are the flavors. It is best to not let participants talk to each other because sometimes they influence one another. Hopefully I will put some pictures up on the blog tonight of our stand!







































3/28 Looking back on Psychology fair, there are some things we could have changed. One thing was that near the end of the day, we started to run out of supplies, like lemonade and cups. A tip is to make participants use the same cup for both flavors because it will make the cup supply last longer. Another that I wish we could have done was watch what people were typing on our form because some people put bad answers that had nothing to do with the experiment and were just messing around which hurt our data. One thing I noticed was that if people smelled it they seemed to get it right, so if you plan to run this experiment tell participants not to smell it. I also bought gallons of water and made the drinks the night before which was very helpful instead of making them their. There were 3 and 1/2 gallons of each flavor and that was barely enough to last till the end of the day, so we probably should have made more. Otherwise we got decent results,and from what I have seen in our results it looks like about half got the flavors right and half got them wrong.