June 24, 2005

Shodor intern, Ruth Cogan, taught today's class. She began the class by demonstrating probability (the measure of how likely it is for an event to occur) with a raffle. Each student received between 1 and 7 raffle numbers, and then they discussed their chances of winning. Ruth explained that probability values range from 0-1 or 0%-100%. Next they moved on to experimental (based on actual tests) and theoretical (based on ideals) probability. The students played the Racing Game with One Die to illustrate the difference between the two kinds of probabilities.

Ruth shared population statistics with the class to further explain the difference between experimental and theoretical probability. Theoretically the world's population should be equally divided between males and females; however, there are 1.06 males for every female in the world, 49.1% of the US population are males and 50.1% females, and 48.1% of the Durham population are males and 51.9% are female.

The class then moved on to an activity that explored the uses of probability. The students were asked to come up with a survey that included at least three possible outcomes (i.e. asking people to choose their favorite kind of soda). They collected data from their class and the staff. Using Bar Graph, the students created charts of their data and made commercials selling the items they found to be the most popular. They key to their sales pitch was the accurate representation of the data collected.