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Children's Motor Performance

📖 Background

Measuring the physical abilities of children is helpful for understanding growth and development, as well as identifying gifted individuals by sports talent scouts. A common measure for physical abilities is the Motor Performance Index.

An athletics talent scout has hired you to find insights in a dataset to assist their search for the next generation of track and field stars.

💾 The data

The dataset is a slightly cleaned version of a dataset described in the article Kids motor performances datasets from the Data in Brief journal.

The dataset consists of a single CSV file, data/motor-performance.csv.

Each row represents a seven year old Malaysian child.

Four properties of motor skills were recorded.

  • POWER (cm): Distance of a two-footed standing jump.
  • SPEED (sec): Time taken to sprint 20m.
  • FLEXIBILITY (cm): Distance reached forward in a sitting position.
  • COORDINATION (no.): Number of catches of a ball, out of ten.

Full details of these metrics are described in sections 2.2 to 2.5 of the linked article.

Attributes of the children are included.

  • STATE: The Malaysian state where the child resides.
  • RESIDENTIAL: Whether the child lives in a rural or urban area.
  • GENDER: The child's gender, Female or Male.
  • AGE: The child's age in years.
  • WEIGHT (kg): The child's bodyweight in kg.
  • HEIGHT (CM): The child's height in cm.
  • BMI (kg/m2): The child's body mass index (weight in kg divided by height in meters squared).
  • CLASS (BMI): Categorization of the BMI: "SEVERE THINNESS", "THINNESS", "NORMAL", "OVERWEIGHT", "OBESITY".

💪 Challenge

Explore the dataset to understand how the attributes of the children affect the motor skills, and the relationship between the four motor skills. Your published notebook should contain a short report on the motor skills, including summary statistics, visualizations, statistical models, and text describing any insights you found.

🧑‍⚖️ Judging criteria

The publications will be graded as follows:

  • [20%] Technical approach.
    • Is the approach technically sound?
    • Is the code high quality?
  • [20%] Visualizations
    • Are the visualizations suitable?
    • Can clear insights be gleaned from the visualizations?
  • [30%] Storytelling
    • Does the data underpin the narrative?
    • Does the narrative read coherently?
    • Is the narrative detailed but concise?
  • [30%] Insights and recommendations
    • How clear are the insights and recommendations?
    • Are the insights relevant to the domain?
    • Are limitations of the analysis recognized?

In the event that multiple submissions have an equally high score, the publication with the most upvotes wins.

import pandas as pd

motor_performance = pd.read_csv("data/motor-performance.csv")
motor_performance
motor_performance.info()