Project Work in Business Mathematics and Statistics
As part of the bachelor’s degree program in“Industrial Engineering (Construction),” the module “Business Mathematics and Statistics” is offered every winter semester. An integral part of this module is a practice-oriented statistical application project. The result of this group project is a custom-designed survey, which is then analyzed using various methods from descriptive statistics.
In recent years, it has been customary to conduct surveys of passersby and visitors in person. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this approach had to be switched to online surveys during the past winter semester; in addition to sharing the survey on social media and other platforms, students developed creative solutions for reaching, for example, an older audience. Shown here is a flyer that a group distributed to 1,000 households in Mainz’s Neustadt district to achieve a representative sample.
Students were given relatively free rein in choosingthe topic of their survey. On the one hand, various topics related to the COVID-19 pandemic were examined. These ranged from working from home to the impact of the pandemic on academic life and the workplace, to an investigation of how the current situation is affecting travel behavior. On the other hand, many groups also chose other current topics such as artificial intelligence, the gentrification of Mainz’s Neustadt district, or the question of whether cash is still needed today.
As part of these studies, it was found, for example, that before the COVID-19 pandemic, 75% of respondents spent no more than 20% of their working hours working from home. Currently, half of the respondents work from home between 40% and 90% of their working hours. A large majority of people can also imagine spending part of their working hours at home in the future.
Another group of questions assessed whether and to what extent survey participants expect the use of AI to increase. Respondents were asked to rate the trend through 2025 on a scale from 0 to 6, where a rating of “3” corresponds to stable usage, while “0” indicates a sharp decline and “6” a sharp increase. Subsequently, future trends through 2030 were estimated using confidence intervals.
The group that had examined travel behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic wanted, among other things, to determine how much the share of air travel had declined due to the pandemic. To this end, data from before 2020 was compared with current results. It was found that the share of air travel had more than halved, mainly in favor of car travel. In addition, a comparison revealed that the results of this survey largely corresponded with data from the German Travel Association (DRV).
In addition to developing the subject matter and statistical methods for evaluating their surveys, the students also acquired fundamental skills in independent project management within a team and took their first steps toward writing academic papers.
