Video transcript
Hello, I'm part of a team that's out here doing some fieldwork in this bushland today. This bag is full of equipment that we are going to be using to gather data for an investigation that we planned before we came out here today.
This video is about data. How we can collect it, how we can process it, and how we can even start to analyse it while we are still out here in the field.
The simplist method is to record your own data and observations on your own worksheet in pen or pencil, during the fieldwork. And then once you are back in the lab, get together with the rest of your group and bring everything together into one central spreadsheet or data table. But this method can have problems if people lose their results, do sloppy work, or make honest mistakes, which they can't then go back into the field to repeat again.
A more reliable method is to use shared apps on our phones to collect and collate everyone's data into one central data table while we are out here in the field. As all the different fieldwork teams type into their data, they can see each other's data pop-up in real time. This makes it easy to see early patterns in the data, and will also help to identify data outliers and operator errors, such as using the wrong units of measurement, which can then be corrected immediately in the field. We can also set the data table to process the data. For example it can automatically calculate the average of a data set. It's also possible to show a warning message if someone makes an error and trieds to enter a result that is impossible or very unlikely.
On the day of the fieldwork, everybody, or at least one person in every small workgroup, needs to bring their phone with some data and be running the same web-based spreadsheet app. We like to use the google sheets app and the download links for this are in the video details below. Your teacher will tell you which account to use when logging in.
Once you have it on your phone, you and your whole team will be ready to collect, process, and even start to analyse your fieldwork data while you are out in the environment doing the fieldwork.
End of transcript.