Tasks | Early Adolescence | Rolling Dice

Tasks - Early Adolescence

Rolling Dice   by Alan Sadler, Rossmoyne SHS

Phase of Development:   Early Adolescence

Learning Area/s:	Mathematics
Strand/s	Chance & Data	Working Mathematically
Substrand/s	Understand Chance Collect & organise data Summarise & Represent Data	Contextualise Mathematics Reason Mathematically
Brief Description:	Dice rolling and simulation.
Expected Outcomes:	Places events in order from those least likely to those most likely to happen on the basis of numerical and other information about the events.
Context:	We have Acorn computer and large screen TB in about 6 of our classrooms. This dice rolling activity is done in all schools at some stage but the computer software (or graphic calculators) allows really long runs to be easily simulated.
Learning Activities/ Experience:	Students first predict how many 1's, 2's, 3's etc. they will get with 30 rolls of a normal dice. 1 2 3 4 5 6 ? ? ? ? ? ? Students perform the experiment and compare result with prediction. Students predict for 180 rolls. 1 2 3 4 5 6 ? ? ? ? ? ? Students now combine their "30 roll results" with those of 5 others and compare results with their prediction. Now predict for totals obtained by adding the 2 numbers obtained when 2 dice are rolled 30 times. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Predict for 180 times and again compare with experiment data obtained by combining own results with those of 5 others. What about 2000 rolls of 2 dice? Make prediction (teacher also makes prediction). Then use speculation program e.g. "Autograph" software by Doug Butler available for Acorn Platform (and possible also available for IBM - I think IBM revision is due out in '99 but don't quote me).
Resources:	Learning Technologies - Computer with dice rolling simulation - e.g. Autograph software on Acorn Platform. Could use random number generator on graphics calculator, but computer simulation can do more than just supply the numbers.