"Chance Encounters"

The marble was going too fast, and jumped over the split part most of the time. There were a few exceptions though, because how would we have had all of those losses.

The game was a big success, even though we had some technical problems with little kids touching and pushing the game over, so that we had to tape it over and over with duct tape. The game ended up to get about an even number of wins and losses, but still we had the problem of the marble going too fast to go through the split pipe for the LOOSE section. It kept on going through the WIN section. That was better than the beginning, when the marble kept on going into the LOOSE section. When we had the problem fixed the kids enjoyed playing it The best part was giving out stickers to the winners.

I realy enjoyed the project, even though Jasper and I got mad at each other sometimes and extremely mad at the pipes when they didn't fit together the way they were supposed to. I finally had to stay in at recess to figure out how to fit the pipes together so the marble could roll through them freely. When the pipes fit together well, and the game was going smoothly, Jasper and I had a lot of fun.

Jasper's Description: I built my probability game with Matt. Together we designed a game constructed out of PVC pipes. The rules of the game was to roll a marble down the tube and if it came out one of the holes you got 1 point but if it goes out the other you lose. We figured out that the probability of winning a point is 50% although that wasn't the case at the fair because the first group of people almost always lost except for one person. The next and the last group of people practically won all the time.

During the fair it was hard work to keep the stall working at all times because lots of liffle kids from the very low grades thought that the fragile pipe structure was a pair of railings and decided to swing on them. We also had a group of kids complaining that the game did not work because they all lost.

In total we had 208 students playing our game. 151 of them won and 57 of them lost. Which means that 72% of the kids won. So the experimental probability of 50% didn't work out too well.