Probability — the likelihood of something happening — can be a challenging concept for kids to grasp. However, it is an important idea to understand, both as a foundation for studying statistics, and just for comprehending the random events that happen throughout life.
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Probability theory is the branch of mathematics that studies probability, and pretty complex it is too. However, it’s easy to give your kid a simple, fun taste of probability in action, using nothing more than two dice and a simple spreadsheet! Along the way they’ll get to practice their addition skills, learn how to create spreadsheets, find out how to use formulas and charts in spreadsheets, and get to grips with the concept of simulation.
This project is fairly straightforward to do, but it does involve a fair amount of maths, reading and computer skills. It’ll work best for ages 8 and up.
Read on to find out how you can do this fun, easy project with your child!
The project you’re going to do uses the Monte Carlo method, named after the famous Monte Carlo Casino in Monaco. The basic idea is to show how random events — in this case, rolling dice — can, if done enough times, produce a statistical pattern.
Here are the experiments you’re going to do:
All you need to do these experiments are:
To save time, you can download all the spreadsheets used in this article. I’ve included them in Numbers, Excel and OpenOffice formats.
Let’s start a probability experiment with just one die. Follow these steps:
Creating a Die Roll column and recording die rolls.
COUNTIF()
function to count all the occurrences of the number 1 in your Die Roll column. In Numbers this is easily done, like this:Using the COUNTIF()
function in Numbers. COUNTIF()
counts all occurrences of a value in a range of cells.
In Excel, you can use =COUNTIF(A:A,'=1')
(assuming your Die Roll column is column A). In OpenOffice Calc, you need to do something along the lines of =COUNTIF($A$2:$A$9999;'=1')
.
'=1'
to the new number: '=2'
, '=3'
and so on.You should now have a neat summary that shows how often each number cropped up during your die rolls:
Our spreadsheet data. The raw die roll data is on the left, and the summary data is on the right.
This chart shows the frequency distribution after 10 rolls of the die.
And after 150 rolls:
The distribution after 150 rolls of a single die.
As you’d expect, the more results you add to the table, the more the chart evens out, since each number on the die has a roughly equal chance of coming out on top. Eventually, after thousands of rolls, each column in the chart would be more or less the same height. (For the record, this type of pattern is known as a discrete uniform distribution.)
From this your kid can see that, even though each throw of the die is unpredictable, we can predict the overall way that the die will behave. This is probability theory in action!
Let’s try the same experiment with two dice.
'=x'
value inside each row’s COUNTIF()
function: '=7'
, '=8'
, '=9'
and so on.Altering the spreadsheet to track two dice instead of one.
After 10 rolls with two dice, my chart looked like this.
Notice that the pattern in this chart looks quite different to the chart for the one-die experiment.
Why do they look different? The answer is that, for one die, each number has an equal chance of coming up. For two dice, however, the total values have different chances of coming up. For example, there is only one way to roll a 2 (1+1), but there are two ways to roll a 3 (2+1 or 1+2). So a 3 is twice as likely to come up as a 2.
This type of pattern, by the way, is known as triangular distribution, and it’s not hard to see why!
How many dice rolls would you need to make a perfect triangular chart? Quite a lot!
Rather than tiring ourselves out rolling dice hundreds of times, let’s make the spreadsheet do the hard work! We’ll create a dice-rolling simulation.
RANDBETWEEN()
function that lets us add a random number to a cell. You want to add the following to the topmost cell in the Die 1 Roll column:=RANDBETWEEN(1,6)
(In OpenOffice, you need to use a semicolon instead of the comma.) This “rolls” a random number between 1 and 6.
Creating two random “dice rolls” with the RANDBETWEEN()
function.
A2
and B2
):=SUM(A2:B2)
Your spreadsheet should now look something like this:
Using the SUM()
function to add together the two dice rolls.
Once you’ve done that, drag the little “corner” button to stretch the table vertically, adding copies of the row as you go:
Dragging the “corner” icon to duplicate rows in Numbers.
In OpenOffice/Excel, you can simply drag the little black dot in the bottom right corner to duplicate the rows:
Duplicating rows in OpenOffice by dragging the little black dot down.
As you add more rows, notice that the chart becomes smoother and smoother. How many rows do you need to add to make a perfect triangle? Chances are you’d never do it, but it does get pretty close after a while. Here’s my chart after 5,000 “dice rolls”:
My two-dice chart after 5,000 simulated dice rolls.
Once again, you can see that if you take a random event like a dice roll and repeat it enough times, a regular pattern often emerges.
Try adding four more columns of random numbers before the Die 1 Roll column to make six simulated dice. Update the Roll and Frequency columns to handle results from 6 to 36. You’ll end up with this type of chart:
This is the pattern you get if you “roll” six simulated dice enough times.
Why do you think the chart is this shape? (This pattern is known as a normal distribution, by the way.)
If this article has whetted your kid’s appetite for the topic, here are some more webpages on probability to check out:
output 1d6
, output 2d6
and output 3d6
, pressing Enter after each one, then press the Calculate button.)I hope you enjoyed reading this article and trying out some of these probability experiments with your child. Now you can put the dice back in the Monopoly set! Have fun. 🙂
[Image credits: Monaco: Casino Monte Carlo by Julo (CC BY), noise reduction // ]