The DOE design experiment The intention is that you discover for yourself how important the following topics are in DOE. Once you have decided on a system to investigate you will be faced with: Which variables should we use? What range should these variables cover? How do we measure these variables (especially the response variable)? What other variability is in the system, is it measurable, is it controllable (e.g. Noise)? Choosing the type of experimental design, full fractional designs, confounding pattern, and handling constraints. How many experiments should be run, are replicates possible, and how to randomize the runs. Understand what George Box means when he says: "the best time to run an experiment is after the experiment". You might be passionate about your hobby, about cooking, or your research area, etc, so coming up with a system to investigate shouldn't be a problem. However, some systems are too complex for the short time you have available, and you might have to cut back to something simpler. So below are some ideas that you can think about and modify, but please work on anything you are interested in, or anything you have ever wondered about. Don't pick a project below that "looks easy": the easy ones are deceptive. Yield of microwave popcorn Rise height of bread Strength of wood glue bond Hover time of a paper helicopter Bounce height of tennis balls or golf balls Note that topics involving cooking and baking can be the most complex due to raw material variability and subjectivity of the outcome variable(s). However, if this is an area that you/your group is interested in, please consider the following: Replace subjective measurements of with something more measurable, e.g. height of muffin, diameter of bun, pH, or similar. Use recipes that are based on weight; recipes and cookbooks that are based on volume for dry ingredients (cups and teaspoons) are inherently flawed and will introduce disturbances (error). Some y-variables such as "doneness" or "time to cook" are extremely subjective and hard to measure Professional taste-testers are trained for months; rather than just a taste number between 0 and 10, break it down into components: acidity, sweetness, mouth feel (texture), crispiness, ''etc'', and add up the values to get a composite taste score. Rather than just using taste as your response, also analyze the standard deviation of your taster's scores, to find the most robust, and pleasing recipe combination. Finally, the system under investigation can be anything, however, you cannot merely copy-paste a problem that you found in a book, technical journal, website, or some other resource. You must be able to prove you planned and performed the experiments yourself; this means that you cannot reuse experimental data from elsewhere.