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ATHK1001 ANALYTIC THINKING: ASSIGNMENT
Late penalty of 5% per calendar day applies.
Online submission: All submissions are to be made online on the ATHK1001 Canvas website.
Submissions will be checked for plagiarism. Artificial Intelligence tools such as ChatGPT that assist
writing are not permitted.
Incorrect submissions: If you discover before the closing date that the file you submitted on
Turnitin was incorrect, and let us know, you may be given the option to resubmit a corrected
version with a 50% penalty or the relevant lateness penalty, whichever is greater.
Word length: 750 words across all questions (excluding references in Question 13). A penalty of
10% will apply to papers that exceed this limit by more than 10%, a 20% penalty if you exceed
20% of the limit, and 30% if you exceed the limit by 30%.
Total marks: 60 (15% of total grade for class)
Background and Aims
A useful skill when dealing with data is being able to estimate plausible answers to questions you
don’t know the answer to. A strategy for doing this is embodied by what are known as “Fermi problems.”
These are numerical estimation problems that break down a difficult estimation problem into steps. A
common example is “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” Most people have no idea of what
the right answer may be, but it can be broken down into a set of estimations about which people have
more confidence: How many people are there in Chicago? How many families? What proportion of
families have a piano? How often does a piano have to be tuned? How long does it take to tune a piano?
How many days a year would a piano tuner work? People can come up with reasonable estimates for the
sub-questions and then combine them to make a reasonable estimate for the main questions. They are
called Fermi problems after the Nobel-prize winning physicist Enrico Fermi who reportedly estimated the
force of the first atomic explosion from how far a dropped piece of paper travelled. He was famous for
being able to use such meagre pieces of information to derive surprisingly good answers to questions.
Most famously Fermi problems are the basis for the Drake equation for estimating the number of extra-
terrestrial civilizations. In both science and engineering education Fermi problems are used to show
students the power of deductive thinking, introduce mathematical modelling, and prepare them for
experimental laboratory work. As such they have been used at educational levels ranging from primary to
tertiary (see ?rleb?ck & Albarracín, 2019).
?rleb?ck and Albarracín (2019) conducted a systematic literature review and identified 91 articles
that addressed Fermi problems. Forty-three of these articles are described as empirical studies focused on
teaching or learning using Fermi problems. These have demonstrated that Fermi methods can be taught,
but ?rleb?ck and Albarracín report that although many of the articles advocate for the benefits of
teaching Fermi problems to students none of the reviewed research focused on explicitly establishing
evidence supporting the argument that Fermi problems improve students’ estimation skills. So there
appears to be no published research that addresses the basic question: Does treating a problem as a Fermi
problem lead to better estimates?
The experiment conducted for this assignment addressed the question of whether participants
make more accurate estimates for Fermi problems rather than non-Fermi problems. It does by treating the
same question as a Fermi problem when it is broken down into sub-questions, or a non-Fermi problems
the target question is presented alone. To evaluate this issue, we tested a set of hypotheses using the data
we collected in tutorials in Week 2.
Method
Participants
A total of 197 students from analytic thinking course (ATHK1001) participated as part of a class
experiment were analysed. A larger number participated but were eliminated from the analysis due to
2
their data not being correctly recorded, they completed too little of the experiment, or they did not give
consent to having their data analysed. Of the analysed participants 92 were female, 100 were male, and
they had a mean age 19.3 years.
Materials
All question used were given as either Non-Fermi problems or Fermi problems. Fermi problems
asked the participant to answer a series of four or five sub-questions before answering the main question.
For example, the Fermi problem version of the question “How many piano tuners do you think there are
in Chicago?” first asked:
What do you think is the population of Chicago?
How many pianos do you think there are in Chicago?
How many hours do you think it takes to tune a piano?
How often do you think pianos are tuned over a ten-year period?
How many hours a year do you think the average piano tuner works?
The Non-Fermi problem version just asked “How many piano tuners do you think there are in Chicago?”
Two sets of nine questions each were used. Most Fermi problems presented in lists of Fermi
problems seems to encourage estimation by multiplication sub-question answers, such as appears to be
the case for the Chicago piano tuners question. However, some questions seem to encourage addition of
sub-question answers. For example, the question “What is the total military budgets of the members of
the UN Security council (USA, Russia, China, UK, France), in millions of $US?” was broken down into
the sub-questions:
What is the military budget of the USA, in millions of $US?
What is the military budget of Russia, in millions of $US?
What is the military budget of China, in millions of $US?
What is the military budget of the UK, in millions of $US?
What is the military budget of France, in millions of $US?
So, we constructed a set of nine multiplicative questions and a set of nine additive questions. A list of the
nine questions for each set together with their sub-questions can be found in the Appendix. Every
participant received both sets of questions: one set as Fermi problems (i.e., with sub-questions) and the
other set as Non-Fermi problems. The experiment had two conditions: in the “Multiplicative condition”
participants answered the nine multiplicative questions as Fermi problems and the nine additive questions
as Non-Fermi problems, where as in the “Additive condition” participants answered the nine additive
questions as Fermi problems and the nine multiplicative questions as Non-Fermi problems.
