Two juniors from The Overlake School recently won the national American Statistical Association Project Competition.

Mihir Velagapudi and Rohan Jha won first place for their project: “Does the grouping of long strings of words significantly improve memorization?”

“We were so surprised when we heard that we had won again. Mihir and Rohan called me at home when we got the news. I’m so proud of these young men,” said Shannon Pridgeon, Overlake’s AP statistics teacher. “They did a really fine job on their project and they both intend to do something with statistics in college.”

In October, a representative with the American Statistical Association (ASA) visited Overlake to present the students with a plaque and TI graphing calculators.

A statistical project is the process of answering a research question using statistical techniques and presenting the work in a written report.

This is not the first time Overlake students have won this award. Last year, two juniors won first place for their project “Multi-Mania: Are Our School’s Multi-Meters Accurate Predictors of Resistance?”

The ASA and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics started the national competition in 1967 to advance the probability and statistics curriculum in schools.