[note: I’m trying up this post at my son’s karate class. It is loud and unfortunately I forgot my headphones. I’m left having to describe the videos without being able to listen to them . . . . ]
I saw a really great problem today from Alexander Bogomolny:
By coincidence I heard the recent Ben Ben Blue podcast yesterday which had a brief mention / lament that it was hard to share mistakes in videos.
This problem is probably a good challenge problem for my older son and definitely above the level of my younger son. But listening to both of them try to work through the problem was really interesting.
I started with my older son – he initially approached the problem by comparing the individual probabilities:
After his initial work, I talked with him about comparing the probabilities of the complete events described in the problem. Initially there was a little confusion on his part, but eventually he understood the idea:
Next up was my younger son – not surprisingly, he had a hard time getting started with the problem. His initial approach was similar to what my older son had done – he looked at the one head and two heads events separately to see which one was more likely for each coin:
As I did with my older son, I asked him to look at the two events as a single event and see which one was more likely when each coin went first:
So, a nice project and an opportunity to see a few mistakes and as well as how kids approach a challenging probability problem.
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