Education Technology


Tossing Dice

Activity Overview

This lesson involves simulating tossing two fair dice, recording the sum of the faces, and creating a dotplot of the sums.

Objectives

  • Students will estimate the probability of outcomes from a dotplot.
  • Students will compare a simulated sampling distribution to the theoretical distribution for the underlying relationship and note that the simulated distribution will more closely approximate the theoretical after a large number of samples.

Vocabulary

  • dice
  • dotplot
  • faces of a die
  • probability of an outcome
  • simulated sampling distribution
  • theoretical distribution

About the Lesson

This lesson involves simulating tossing two fair dice, recording the sum of the faces, and creating a dotplot of the sums.
As a result, students will:

  • Observe how the simulated sampling distribution for the sums of the faces changes as the number of samples is increased.
  • Compare their distribution of the sums of the faces of two randomly-tossed dice to their classmates' distributions, and observe how the distributions are alike and how they differ.
  • Answer probability questions based on a dotplot of the sums of the faces of two randomly-tossed fair dice.
  • Compare the distribution of the sums of the faces from two randomly-tossed fair dice to the theoretical distribution for the sums of the faces.