Day 149: How Old Are You?

While listening to the radio on the way to school this morning, one news item was heralding in Microsoft’s new app “How Old Do I Look?” Basically, you input a photo of yourself (or someone else) and the app guesses your age.  There is also a discussion of the story behind the demo, which would be very interesting to my techie kids.

SCORE!!!!  This seems to be the makings of an authentic application of AP Statistics concepts with a real situation.  Although we use iPads, I quickly looked for a similar app on the appropriate platform and I found one (actually a couple), so at least I have the initial technology to use with an activity.  I was thinking that the kids would find the difference between their actual age and computer’s guess – I see possibly using z-scores here.  Maybe have them take a variety of head-shots and calculate the differences and find an average and then build an approximate sampling distribution.

Interestingly, there were also some great comments about the usefulness of the app.  So I screenshot them, and will use as follow-up questions.  Now how to use it in class?!