Congratulations! You have just received a new job which includes a salary increase to $40,000 a year! The job will be done through telecommuting, so you have the option of living anywhere you would like. You are excited about numerous possibilities, but how will you decide where to live?
 
 

Task:

There are several parts to your task. First, your group will use the Internet to help you find information about each of the five cities you have chosen to explore, including your present location. Then based on the four criteria which you have chosen as most important to you when looking for a possible place to live, your group will construct a data table in Excel, with weightings, to help determine which city is best for you. Next, construct a graph in Excel to illustrate the results of the city analysis. Additionally, your group will create a PowerPoint presentation to summarize the steps to your solution, including the results graph imported from Excel. Lastly, each student will prepare a report utilizing Microsoft Word, containing a description of your group's possible city options and a discussion of your scale for weighting the value of each variable used to compare the cities.

Resources:

Homefair City Reports: "cost of living and city info reports" at http://www.homefair.com will provide you with useful infomation about the five cities you must choose from.
Compare Winston-Salem, NC and Woodridge, IL
City Reports

Process:

1.  From the categories given by the Homefair City Reports, your group must decide which four variables are most important to you when looking for a possible place to live.

Demographics
Climate
Cost of Living
Education / Health
Major Employees
Colleges and Universities
Newspapers

Once your group has decided on the four criteria, your group will weight the importance of these variables. Use a scale of 1 - 5; let 5 represent the best and 1 represent the worst. This explaination of which criteria were chosen, why you chose them, and their weighting will be included in the PowerPoint presentation, and the written report.
 

3.  Your group will discuss your findings and input the information into an Excel spreadsheet in the form of a table, rating each city based on the particular variable and your findings from the Internet. This first table should also include a weight column, which will display the importance of these variables. A seperate table on the same worksheet should show the weighted scores and the total scores for each city. From the information in the second table, construct a graph using Excel to illustrate the results of the city analysis.

4.  As a group, work together to build a PowerPoint presentation outlining your group's results. The presentation should include sufficient background to justify your process and results.

5.  Individually, use Microsoft Word to prepare a paper summarizing your group's results. The material contained in this report will be very similar to the group presentation, but the purpose is to demonstate to me that your fully understand and participated in the entire group project. Remember, this is to be done individually!
 
 

Conclusion:

After completing this acitivity, you will have:

• Familiarized yourself with some of the useful information that is availiable on the Internet
• Collected data from the Internet
• Utilized Excel to compile information in a table form, compute numbers using Excel commands, and construct a graph
• Utilized PowerPoint to summarize the collected information and present the results clearly to the class
• Summarized the information in the form of a paper