Track: High School and Middle School STEM Competition

Abstract

“Practice makes perfect“ is passed around frequently without much evidence to support it. Although there have been experiments using mice to test if practice time and maze completion time are correlated, the results cannot directly be applied to humans. This experiment uses a custom website that randomly generates different mazes. The participants used the arrow keys to navigate through the mazes. Each participant completed four increasingly difficult variations, as the function of the arrow keys were changed for each variation. After practicing for a certain amount of time, they solved three timed mazes before resuming practice. A two sample t-test determined that participants improved with practice, but only for the most difficult variation The experiment also featured participants of ages 8 to 73 to determine whether maze completion time would increase with the participant’s age. A linear regression analysis shows that younger people generally solved mazes faster than older people.