Tuesday, April 28, 2015

A review of dice tossing, some more links for Probability games. and The Starfish Throwers documentary

I came across this link, while looking for one of the Probability games a student was playing:
Thanks, Mrs. Newman:

http://www.mrsnewman.net/probability.htm

The students usually like games relating to the game Jeopardy.  Here is a game that looks similar to this type of game we have played in the past.  This time, it is based on the Jeopardy model:

follow this link:  http://www.quia.com/cb/749664.html



Although the following picture looks a touch confusing, it is not meant to be.
It spells out the possible combinations of dice tosses.  There are 36 in total.  On the note that I wrote in pencil are the following sums in columns of the dice combinations.  For example, when you role a 1 on one die, you could role a 1 on the other die.  That would give you a combination of (1,1) and a total of 2.  If you follow the columns, across, you will see that the totals of the two numbers are equal to the rows found below.

The sum of 7 can be made 6 different ways.  I circled the possibilities in black.  Since there are 36 possible outcomes and 6 ways of rolling a 7, the probability can be calculate using the formula:

from: http://study.com/cimages/multimages/16/definition.png


So, we divided 6 by 36 to find the decimal answer and then converted it to a percentage.  We did the same for the theoretical probability of rolling a 12; the calculations are below, in purple. 


I posted the trailer for the The Starfish Throwers documentary that is part of this year's Hot Docs for Schools film festival.  As part of the viewing of the film, the students will be required to do some writing and reflecting.  While a more formal assignment will be handed out, the initial assignment, to be done in jot note form in their Language notebooks,  here is the initial assignment, to be done as part of the pre-writing process:


To kind of kick-start the students, I jotted some notes on the board.  It is meant to help the students understand what is expected of them.



HOMEWORK

- jot notes for documentary in Language notebook

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