We’re coming to the end of our first unit of the year on basic probability, and headed towards the fun world of counting principles, including permutations, combinations and the binomial theorem. To review ideas regaring factorial and size, students were faced with the following question on the board:
Many students ignored the exclamation point right off the bat, giving replies like “it’s a little bigger than 51”, or “pretty big”, until a student realized that I clearly meant factorial here. This genrated classroom discussion about what factorial meant, and some side discussion about how big a number this could be, including some calculator experimentation. We’re off to a good start!
But just HOW big is this number? To get students thinking, I asked them to consider what a quantity that big could represent, being as creative (within reason) as they like. Some of the responses were awesome fun. Did you know Kanye had THAT much swag?
To finish this opener, I played one of my favorite clips: from the British panel show QI, Steven Fry uses a simple deck of cards to do something never before done by man! I’ve dicsussed this clip on the blog in the past, so visit there for more info regarding this card shuffling experiment. Enjoy.
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