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Can We Help Same birthday whats the chance video

Mathematician Adam Spencer answers a question about something called the 'birthday paradox'. Find out what this has to do with birthdays and the number of people in a room.

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MathXplosion, Ep 8: Birthday probability

What is the probability there are at least two people in your class who have the same birthday? If you have at least 23 people in your class, the chances are good. Find out the maths behind this theory.

Interactive

Mystery spinner: challenge

Look at results in a frequency graph compiled after testing an unseen spinner. Work out the likely proportions of colours in the mystery spinner. Use a tool to build a new spinner (a dial with a pointer). Choose up to five equal-sized sectors. Fill the sectors with up to five colours. For example, make a five-part spinner ...

Interactive

The foul food maker: go figure

This tutorial is suitable for use with a screen reader. It explains how the use of simple words can describe the likelihood of everyday events. How likely is an event: certain, likely, equal chance, unlikely or certainly not? Answer some questions using these words and then build your own examples. Learn how to describe ...

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Catalyst: Probability and the birthday paradox

Even when a maths problem seems simple – for example, the chance of two people sharing a birthday – the maths can run counter to our human intuition. Mathematician Lily Serna poses a maths problem to the Clovelly Bowling Club: how many people do you need to gather to get a 50 per cent chance of any two people in that group ...

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Catalyst: Probability and the gambler's fallacy

Mathematician Lily Serna visits Luna Park to explain a great probability pitfall. She shares a century-old tale from Monte Carlo casino, and then she puts its lesson to the test. If you flip a coin and it lands on heads three times in a row, what result would you predict for the next flip? Find out why intuition might land ...

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What Are the Chances?

Do you know what chance is? It's the probability or the likelihood of something happening. Watch this video as Grace explains the probability of picking a red marble out of a bowl. What's the probability of picking a green marble?

Interactive

Spinner

This is an interactive resource that investigates experimental and theoretical probability based on a spinner. The student can select the number of segments on the spinner and simulate spinning the spinner with a mouse click. The outcome of each trial is recorded in a table along with a comparison between the cumulative ...

Interactive

Racing game with one die

This is an interactive game that investigates probability by simulating a two-car race, in which the movements of the cars are based on the roll of a die. Cars advance when certain numbers are rolled, and the student can experiment with probability by selecting which car moves forward for a given outcome of the roll of ...

Online

reSolve: Scrabble Stats

This sequence of lessons invites students to collect data about letter frequency in a variety of text sources. They use their findings to critically evaluate letter point values in Scrabble, compare them to historical values, create their own themed Scrabble point values and to decipher an encoded excerpt of text. Each ...

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MathXplosion, Ep 49: The probability of finding matching socks

Check out this probability puzzle that requires you to weigh all the possibilities. Pick the most likely outcome when confronted with a drawer full of loose, unpaired socks! How did Eric come up with a matching pair?

Interactive

The foul food maker: questions 1

Use a vending machine to get an awful meal such as fly soup, worm pasta or yucky duck. The machine serves a meal randomly from four slots. Work out the likelihood of getting each type of meal. Then choose a matching probability word: impossible, unlikely, equal, likely or certain. Run simple probability experiments. Compare ...

Online

TIMES Module 1: Number and Algebra: sets and Venn diagrams - teacher guide

This is a 22-page guide for teachers. The module provides an introduction to set notation and demonstrates its use in logic, probability and functions.

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Introduction to probability

This is a website designed for both teachers and students in year 5, and addresses components of the probability topic. It is particularly relevant for discussing chance experiments where the probability of events is equally likely and for describing those events using fractions. There are pages for both teachers and students. ...

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Syllabus bites: More Venn diagrams

An interactive exploration of Venn diagrams with three attributes.

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Thumb wrestling tournament

In this introductory activity students use a simple thumb-wrestling tournament to analyse a series of matches in which there can only be one victor. Students work in small groups to explore different ways of mapping out the events of a tournament, introducing the concept of constructing sample spaces and tree diagrams as ...

Online

TIMES Module 13: Statistics and Probability: chance, year 8 - teacher guide

This is a 15-page guide for teachers. It continues the development of probability. A careful consideration of outcomes and equally likely outcomes is undertaken. In year 8, students see that these are a special case of finding probabilities of events by summing probabilities of the disjoint (or mutually exclusive) outcomes ...

Online

Probability

This is a website designed for both teachers and students that addresses probability from the Australian Curriculum for year 7 students. It contains material on the language of probability, experiments and counting, and the probability of an event, and explains the mathematical use of the terms 'random' and 'randomly'. ...

Interactive

Syllabus bites: The language of Venn diagrams

Interactive activities supporting students learning to describe regions of a Venn diagram.

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Comparing chance

A simple interactive simulation in which students compare probabilities.