When I got up this morning my younger son was playing some sort of dice game in the kitchen. An hour later he was still rolling dice so I finally asked him what he was doing:
It turns out what he was actually trying to was find the first sum that would appear 40 times, but I only understood that later.
This seemed like an easy activity to turn into a project, so we got started by having him explain what he was doing:
Next we turned to Mathematica to play around a little bit with the problem. I had to explain some terms first (and sorry I had part of the screen out of view for a bit). After explaining those terms we looked at the distribution of the sums:
Finally we wrapped up by taking a very deep dive into the distribution of the sum of three 10 sided dice. The kids were able to understand the probability of getting a 3 or a 30, and then we talked about a few of the other probabilities that Mathematica was showing us.
Later in the morning my son finished his game. 15 was the first roll to appear 40 times.
It was really fun to base a project on a math problem that my son came up with on his own.
Mike's Math Page 