Santa brought my grandson Archer a Mattel Corkscrews Crash track this week. Archer’s been busy ever since running time trials in triplicate on the 48 Hot Wheels cars in his set and computing averages for each group of runs. Considering he’s only in first grade, Archer shows a lot of promise for being an engineer like me, my father and my grandfather (if I do say so myself). However, he needs a bit of work on deciphering how to record times that end in single digits on the hundredths, for example, Archer wrote a time of 1.08 seconds as 1.8—without the zero. I’m working on this. Decimals are tricky for needing to kept in place.
Being overwhelmed with data, I sampled out 12 cars from the dozens that Archer has tested thus far and typed the results into Design-Expert® software’s tools for this one-factor (categorical) comparative experiment. They came out highly significant with very clear divisions between the slowest and fastest cars. (Full disclosure—Archer did not fully randomize the trials, another thing for me to teach as he matures, but I will wait a year or two to try.)
The fastest run—taking less than 1 second to slither through the Corkscrew-was made by a vintage Malaysian entry: the 1994 Mattel Hot Wheels Power Piston Viper Strike. You can see this highlighted in the graph (the bars show least significant differences at 95% confidence).
The trials are continuing at my house now. I am reverting to my ‘Hot Wheels shuffle’ stride when walking about—carefully limiting my step height to avoid stepping on the metal cars. The ones with the pointy fins can be very painful. But it’s all for a great cause. Experimentation!
