Experimental Probability

By | 8th March 2019

Download the PowerPoint here.

Wrote some questions including some moving between relative frequency and frequency.

Discussion. Also a task I’m not sure if I like.

I’ve included this at the end. I have run this task a few times and been dissatisfied every time.

In my head, I imagine students trying to make the die loaded by weighting it, rolling it lots of times to test the relative frequency to see if they have got close, then refining the weight inside their cube. There’s a few reasons I think it’s never gone as well as I would have wished.

  1. It’s quite fiddly to make the net, put a weight in it, fold it up, take out the weight and fold it up again.
  2. It’s harder than it looks!
  3. What MATHEMATICALLY are students thinking about when they’re doing this task? Are they just adjusting weights. I don’t really know if the focus of the task is the MATHEMATICS.

I’ve left it in here (at the end), though, because it’s the first task I ever thought up (in my PGCSE year) and one day I want to run it and make it work.

One day.

PS: These are a game changer in terms of noise! Every school should have a set.