4.06 Coin Flip Experiment

4.6 Coin Flip Experiment Curriculum Page

Portfolio Reflection Questions:

1. (POGIL) According to your results, does App Inventor's PRNG provide a good model of randomness?

• According to our results, App Inventor’s PRNG is pretty accurate because the resulting total percentage of heads is 50.05% In order for it to be considered a good model of randomness, heads and tails are supposed to be split evenly 50:50.

2. (POGIL) A friend claims that flipping a coin 100 times and finding that it comes up heads only 45% of the time shows that the coin is biased. How should you reply?

• I would reply to this by saying it is not biased. In order for it to be an accurate representation of randomness the coin should land on tails 50% of the times and heads 50% of the time. This 45% is close to the target of 50% which makes the flipping of the coin random.

3. Because we are using a coin flip app, this experiment really tests only that App Inventor's random integer block generates a 1 around half the time. Is this a sufficient test for App Inventor's PRNG? What other experiments might you do to increase your confidence in App Inventor’s PRNG?

• Since the coin flip app really only experiments App Inventor's random integer block, it is not necessarily sufficient for testing App Inventor's PRNG. In order to increase my confidence in App Inventor's PRNG I would do more experiments with larger number in order to see if the average randomness of flipping a heads/tails still generates a percent close to 50.