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 Annals of Improbable Research, Vol. 5, No. 6, pg. 10.

How to Write a Clear Research Report

by Caroline , Eric , and  Emily 

 Alexandria, Virginia

Abstract

We had some fun with a stacking rings toy and learned something about how the perceptions of adults are

different from those of babies.

Introduction

Almost everyone has played with stacking ring toys at one time or another. Most households with small

children have them, and they are simple yet fun playthings for babies, children, and adults. Many of them have

five rings of different colors (in our case blue, green, yellow, orange, and red) and often the largest ring is blueand the smallest red (this is true for our toy).

Caroline and Eric are PhD scientists, Emily is an 11-month-old baby, and the three of us would like to

shar e with you some things we learned by playing with this neat toy.

What is the toy like?

Our toy is a yellow tower with five rings: blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. The rings are different sizes

and the tower is tapered so that the only way you can fit all the rings on the tower is to put the biggest one on

the bottom and so on up to the smallest one on top. This puts the rings in rainbow order with blue at the

 bottom, then green, yellow, and orange, and finally red on top. You can see the stacking rings toy in the

 picture below.

 

Caroline and Eric play with the toy

Caroline and Eric played with the toy for a while, and always ended up leaving the rings stacked in

rainbow order with blue at the bottom and red at the top. We've written this order in the table below.

Emily plays with the toy

Emily took all the rings off, and then put them back on in different orders. She was happy with all the

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different arrangements she found. We've written some examples in the table. She found that she could put a

ring on top of the top ring and it would be pretty stable since the tower pokes its head a little above the top of 

the red ring. This is the "Level 6" listed below.

Table: Different ring orders

Caroline Emily put the rings in all these ways

& Eric's a b c d e f

order

Level 6 yellow green red green orange red

Level 5 red orange red green red red yellow

Level 4 orange orange orange orange

Level 3 yellow blue yellow yellow

Level 2 green green green green

Level 1 blue blue blue

What we learned

Caroline and Eric always found the same ring order, but Emily had a lot of fun with all sorts of differentarrangements. Maybe Caroline and Eric were too quick put the rings in the order they knew was right. Do

we know that their arrangement is "better" than any of Emily's arrangements? Perhaps adults shouldn't jump

to conclusions so quickly.

Conclusions

We had a good time playing with the toy and Caroline and Eric learned that their preconceived ideas are

not necessarily true.

You can also read the scientific version of this report.