Dice Rolling Lab
Highlights of the activity
- Students are placed into small groups and given a die. The group's task is to determine if the die is fair or “loaded”.
- Fairness of the die will be experimentally determined by calculating the probability of rolling each number on the die.
- Groups will have the opportunity to use multiple representations to present experimental data.
Reasons to spend class time on the activity
We have found that students frequently have little experience with using statistics in an applied experimental setting. Performing this activity before focusing on quantum mechanical probabilities provides students with a more easily visualized probability model that can be referred to in quantum cases which cannot be seen. This activity will also give students the opportunity to observe how the statistical results found in this experiment change when the number of trials or the number of experiments is changed (i.e. how the results look for 1 experiment with 10 trials compared to results from 10 experiments with 1 trial).