When you were a kid, did you ever talk your mom into buying you a box of cereal just so you could have the toy? I was the youngest of six, so I thought that was why I could never get the toy but we did simulations in probability that helped explain why it is sometimes difficult to collect all the toys that are available.
We were given the task of collecting six different toys from a cereal manufacturer who puts one toy in each box. First we predicted how many boxes we would need to purchase before we would have all six. I was not very optimistic - I guessed thirty-six boxes. Next she had us use the random number generator on our calculator to randomly select numbers from 1 to 6. She also explained that this could easily be done with a dice or a spinner. We used a table to tally our results.
I was surprised that it only took me nine boxes of cereal to get all six toys. However it some other students almost thirty boxes to collect all six.
Here is a great website if you are wanting to teach (or try) this lesson. It has the cereal lesson plus a couple of more.
No comments:
Post a Comment