Square Dance Experimentation

[bjarvis]

I started wondering a little while ago: who has to dance more steps, the folks dancing boy or girl? Does this vary from level to level? Do some callers make one role work harder than the other (at least in terms of dance steps)?

Tonight, the experimentation began.

Tonight was a rare 5th Thursday so DC Lambda Squares hosted an A2/C1 club night with Ett McAtee calling. I put pedometers on at least each dancer of a particular couple and recorded their step count per tip, noting which were A2 and which were C1.

While the pedometers are of the same manufacturer and lot, they have different sensitivity. I'm trusting that by randomly switching these between dancers across the course of the experiment, the variation will average out in a sufficiently large sample space.

The raw numbers aren't meaningful yet. I'll write more on this when I have a much larger sample. Who knows... it may be good filler in a slow news quarter for the GCA journal. :-)

Comments

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

The cheapo pedometers I have merely measure number of steps. More advanced ones can take a preset which will then be used to calculate a total distance as well.

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

yes, but that preset / calibration only works for walking, where the user can calibrate for the length of his/her pace, which is going to be pretty standard for flat walking.

dancing on the other hand has steps of many different lengths, and the distribution of long/short/medium will vary by dance and dancer (and that's what you're trying to measure). You won't get distance travelled out of a pedometer for dancing. You'll only get numbers of steps. The instrument works on a weeny pendulum, and count the number of times your upper leg moves forward, out of the vertical.