The Monday prior to Thanksgiving, we have an event called Grandparents' Day. Students get to bring their Grandparents to two classes, attend chapel with them and have lunch with them. Today I not only had the opportunity to teach my daughter in Probability and Statistics, but her three grandparents - my mother, my father and my mother-in-law.
In that class, we did the following activity involving probability and simulation. I had 4 index cards; one card had a wave, one card had a circle, one card had a plus and once card had a star. I asked for a student volunteer to guess what card I was holding to my head. We did 10 trials and the student got 9 right! Amazing!!! Since the average number correct would be 2.5 in 10 attempts, getting 9 right seemed very unusual. But just how unusual? Was I giving Neo signals to increase the probability of getting it right? Using dice and cards, the students worked with their grandparents to conduct a simulation to see how many they would get right in 10 trials if the probability of success was 1/4. You can see the results from our dotplot below.
Next we used Fathom to run the simulation and we also calculated the binomial probability of getting 9 right by guessing. The simulated results show that in 100 trials none resulted in 9 correct matches. This makes sense since the theoretical probability is 2.86 x 10-5. Our Fathom results are shown below.
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