At the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
To refresh students about the topic of probability and to establish what the students already know and do not know, each student will receive 2-3 sticky notes at the beginning of class. Students are to write anything they think the topic of probability might consist of. Then students are to post their sticky notes on the wall, grouping them together if there are similar ideas that were written. The teacher will then gather the students around the sticky notes and begin to read through the sticky notes, explaining any concepts that students might be unsure of.
Students will begin the lesson by playing a game called "Dice Difference". Students will work in pairs and each student will have a die. They roll the dice together and then calculate the difference between the highest and lowest score obtained from the dice roll. For example, if they roll a 3 and a 5, the difference is 2
Then from that difference, they must see which one of the rules that difference applies to.
Rules:
Now students are tasked to decide whether or not this game is a fair game or not. Whether both players have the same chance of winning a point.
This game encourages students to critically evaluate the game they are playing and justify whether this game is fair or not.
The teacher then gathers the class for a group discussion to consolidate learning and share findings.
Game sourced from Stuart Palmer, Workshop Week 2 13/08/19
Activity 2 involves the use of concrete materials to allow students to physically visualise the probability of getting certain candies from two different cups at random. The activity can be modified to counters, marbles or anything that is readily available to the teacher.
Students will work in pairs and each student will pick a candy from each cup and work out an area model to act as a visual representation of the probability event. This can be repeated until they are to form a 4x4 area model. Along with expressing the outcomes in terms of what type of candy they get, students are also to write down the probability of getting those combinations. For those that finish earlier, they can be challenged to do a 3 chance experiment instead with 3 cups filled with candies.
Students would have already learnt how to express outcomes in the form of P(Events) = number of favourable outcomes/ total number of outcomes, thus students are challenged to express the favourable outcomes of a two chance experiment and three chance experiments.
After the activity is finished, students are free to eat the candies.
Some questions the teacher can ask the students include: What factors affect the favourable outcome? Can this experiment work with something other than candy? Can this experiment also work for models larger or smaller than 4x4?
Source from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyAwxrUadtw&t=1s