A short post today, as I am out the door for a meeting with our NCTM local group, ATMOPAV. Please check out our website, where we have information on local awards, and house our award-winning newsletter!
I enjoy giving problems with solutions which go against our instinct. In statistics, there are many opporunities for this, and today’s opener in my AP class seemed innocent enough:
Which will more likely occur first in a string of coin tosses: HTH or HTT?
After a few moments of debate, there was universal agreement that the two patterns are equally likely, and therefore we should have an equal expectation of seeing them occur first in a string. But the correct answer goes against this intuitive notion.
Peter Donnelly’s TED Talk – “How Stats Fool Juries” is easily digestible for the high school crowd. I show it over 2 days, first to present the coin-tossing problem. Then in our next class meeting I will show the second half, where conditional probabilities and the multiplication rule make appearances in courtroom trials. In the video below, fast-forward to about the 5:30 mark if you want to learn about the coin-tossing problem, or watch from the beginning for some statistics humor.
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