It’s become a tradition at CivicScience where I clear my schedule on Take Your Child to Work Day (TYCTWD) to host a group of kids in our office. Pedro (which I’m fairly certain is Portuguese for “Buzz Kill”), our COO, isn’t a big fan of TCYTWD because he thinks it leads to a lot of lost productivity in the office. So, I do the whole thing myself: emailing the invitations, preparing the agenda, leading all of the activities, and taking everyone to lunch. I actually love it – like I’m molding the next generation of market research geeks or something. And I always learn something valuable.
The day starts with an orientation about the business, what we do, how we do it, and why. My own daughter asked me who started the company. Nobody seemed to believe the answer.
Then, each kid talks about their different hobbies or interests and I find questions in our system that are relevant. They then work as a group to write some poll questions to launch in our system. I show everyone how to search and use our data and reporting platform (Expect to see the tagline “So easy a 9-year-old can use it!” in our product marketing in the near future).
Next, they set up their own personal dashboards, filled with interesting questions and results they find. I show them how to interpret the results and do some basic cross-tabbing. We break for lunch – always burgers and tater tots at the neighborhood gastropub. After lunch, each of the kids writes a blog post about one of the questions they found.
It’s remarkable watching them work. They’re so fluent in technology and not even remotely intimidated by numbers. What I really love is the perspective they bring to the results. They’re not biased or cynical, the way most adults are. They see truth in numbers. Black and white. They don’t overthink – a lesson many business people could learn.
This year, we had 4 kids: Noelle (9), Luke (9), Nora (12), and Adam (14). Adam was the lone veteran of the group, which you will see in his post. Each of them chose a wildly different topic to study and came up with a fun, thought-provoking, or even surprising conclusion. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed helping them.
Luke: Hi, I’m Luke and I’m 9 years old. I’m here at CivicScience for Take Your Kid to Work Day. My topic today is the debate about the U.S.A. Women’s soccer team and the U.S.A. Men’s soccer team’s pay. I chose this topic because I love to play soccer. It’s not right that just because men might be bigger and stronger that women should get paid less.
In the 2014 World Cup, the U.S. Men’s team barely made the World Cup and only made it to the top 16 and the team made 9 million dollars. But the U.S. Women’s team made it to the World Cup in 2015 and won but only got paid 2 million dollars. That’s a 7 million dollars difference even though the women’s team got farther and won the World Cup.
On the CivicScience site, I found a question about the women’s and men’s soccer teams.
The data shows that 58% out of 3,608 people say that the U.S.A. Women’s soccer team is better than the men’s team and 10% disagree. And 32% have no opinion. I feel that these results are correct. The U.S.A. Women’s soccer team has outshined the men’s team because the women won the World Cup and the men didn’t.
I feel that the results are correct because the women are better. Even though the men are stronger and faster, that doesn’t mean that the girls are worse. For example, in the turtle and the hare, the hare is way, way faster than the turtle but the turtle still beats him in the race, with no head starts. The turtle should get paid better than the hare. I hope that FIFA will make the U.S.A. Women’s team have the same pay as the U.S. Men’s team.
Noelle: Hi! I’m Noelle, I am 9 years old, and I am with my dad at “Bring Your Child to Work Day.” I get to write about a question I am interested in and I picked, “Should kids be allowed to have devices at the dinner table?” Well, I picked this topic because every time my family and I have dinner together, me or my sister always try to bring a device to the table. He says “No devices at the dinner table,” so we put our devices away. But my dad still looks at his phone sometimes, which isn’t fair. (Editor’s Note: This is MY daughter).
Anyways, you can see that my dad is one of the billion people who doesn’t want their kid to have devices all the time. But the people who are not my dad or the 999,999,999 people who agree with him are people who think it is okay to let kids have devices at dinner. They are not willing to teach their kids how to socialize and not stare at their screens all day.
I found a question in CivicScience about this topic. This is what it says.
8% or 766 people said that it was okay for kids to have devices at the dinner table and 92% said the opposite. 26% of people under age 18 said Yes. Personally, I agree with the 92% who said no. I hope some day that 9,889 out of 9,889 people say that kids should not be allowed to have devices at the dinner table.
Nora: I am a middle school student named Nora Conaway. I picked the question “Where Would You Rather Vacation?” with the three answers of the beach, the mountains, or ‘I am not sure yet.’ I chose this question to analyze because every year my family makes the decision to go to the mountains or the beach. Personally, I prefer the beach because of the warm weather and when I get to swim in the ocean. Also, I enjoy searching for seashells and taking walks on the beach.
Looking at the full results, more people want to go to the beach than the mountains:
After studying the data, it turns out that most females agree with me that they would much rather go to the beach. Furthermore, wealthier people who make over $150,000 per year are the most likely to choose the beach. 32% of people who live in the city would prefer the mountains, while 41% of people who live in rural areas would choose the mountains. Moreover, 61% of people age 35-54 prefer to go to the beach but only 52% of people under age 25 prefer the beach. It’s surprising that more young people disagree with me. Otherwise, I think that information collected and analyzed makes sense. I would have to agree that women are more likely to choose a more relaxing, laid-back vacation. Although, men would choose a more active vacation with hiking and biking.
Adam: Hello, my name is Adam, and I am a 14-year-old boy that has attended Civic Science both this year and the previous year for Take Your Child to Work Day. Last year, I made a poll to determine what 2015 video games the public most most excited for. The collected data is as follows:
Now, in 2016, I have determined that the public was generally correct about how well these games would sell. That data is as follows:
- Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 was the best selling game of 2015, with over 250 million sales worldwide.
- Batman: Arkham Knight sold over five million units worldwide, and became the best selling game of June 2015. However, it’s PC sales did very poorly due to an extremely buggy launch state, which was likely due to Rocksteady (the company responsible for developing the game) exporting the PC version to a different development company. In fact, the bugs were so bad that Rocksteady pulled the game from Steam (the most popular online video game seller) and put it back four months later, with only most of the bugs fixed. Rocksteady has also denied releasing the sales numbers of the PC units.
- Assassin’s Creed Syndicate had disappointing sales during its opening week, but improved by the following week. The negative initial response is likely due to Assassin’s Creed Unity’s (the previous Assassin’s Creed game) poor release state, due to its high amount of bugs. Unfortunately, Ubisoft has denied releasing specific sales numbers.
- Halo 5: Guardians had the lowest sales of any Halo game in history, only selling 1.46 million units in its opening week. It is theorized that this is partly due to Halo 5: Guardians being the first Halo game to lack spit-screen multiplayer, which is especially bad because Halo is infamous for being a game that helped people bond during its early years, which was entirely due to its split-screen multiplayer.
- Finally, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain sold over three million units during its opening week. While this is impressive, some fans of the series have found the game to be slightly bitter-sweet, due to this being the last Metal Gear game developed by Hideo Kojima, as he left Konami shortly after the game’s release, due to a controversial falling out with the company. This led some to believe that this is the final Metal Gear game.
Overall the numbers from last year are very accurate. We are loading new questions about the major video game releases for 2016, which I will write about next year.
