This morning my older son and I talked through the following problem from the 2003 AMC 10b:
It turned out that an arithmetic problem is what led to his confusion on this problem, but discussing this problem was a nice opportunity to talk about discrete probability. At the end of our conversation I told him to always remember the underlying idea in discrete probability is simple -> count the cases that work and then count the total cases. It may not always be so easy to do, but it really is all that you have to do to solve the problem.
After he went off to school I this problem posted on Twitter:
This is a terrific problem, and it is really tempting to try to break the problem into pieces and essentially to try to solve it with recursion.
But remember the simple little idea I told my son -> count the cases that work and count the total cases. You’ll find a delightful solution to the problem!
Mike's Math Page 