"Chance Encounters"

Game Design: Korihito and I tried to design a game to calculate the probability for a seed to travel certain paths. To do this we took 4 spa bottles and electrical pipes. We twisted the pipes and covered the entrance into the pipes so that the player would not be able to tell where the seed would end up. The seed entered the “mouth” of our construction and the seed could then fall through one of the four spa bottles. We set up the tubes so that the seed would directly come out after falling down. This way we don’t have to take our construction apart each time. Although our construction looked crooked the four tubes were set up in such a way that the seed would have the same chance to go through all of the tubes.

The Rules for: I'm Getting Dizzy To play this probability game you need to insert a mung seed into the opening at the top. Eventually the seed has ends it’s journey and falls through one of the bottles (bottle: A,B,C,D). If the seed falls through Bottle A,B, or C, the player wins a point -!!Yes!! If the seed falls through Bottle D, the player gets no point -!!No!!

The Theoretical Probability Since we have constructed the game in such a way that the seed has the same chance for falling through all the four bottles the theoretical probability is __ for winning. This is because the probability for falling through bottle A is __, bottle B is __ and bottle C is __. The theoretical probability is 0.75 Therefore the theoretical percentage chance for winning is = _ x 100 = 75 percent.

Playing the Game with the Students from the Lower School - I had a great experience letting the lower school students participate in our probability game. Luckily we had success because lots of students liked our game and came to play it. Sometimes the top of our game was knocked off and we had to fix it and make sure that it was set up right each time. We were kept busy! Each of the palyers was given one mung seed. We counted the players that tried our game and kept track of how many won and how many players lost.

Experimental Probability
The total number of Players were 182 + 34 = 216
The total number that won = 182
The total number that lost = 34
The experimental probability for winning = 182/216 = 0 .842
The experimental probability for winning is 84.2 percent

Since the theoretical probability is 75 percent and the experimental probability is much higher it could be that the construction we had made, even though we had tried to set it up carefully, was allowing the seed to go through bottles A, B and C more easily than bottle D.

Korehito's Report. This game's rule is if you get red you can't get a point, but if you get yellow, blue or green you get a point.

The probability of winning is 75 percent, 3/4 or 0.75 because there are four numbers and one of them doesn't get a point, but three of them get a point.

The probability of losing is 25 percent, 1/4 or 0.25 because there are four numbers and one of them loses and three of them win.

The experimental probability was 84 percent winning and 16 percent losing.