Rolling the Dice

Last week we started testing dice in our class. We wanted to know which number gets rolled the most. We have been learning about the language around probability, possible and impossible, likely and unlike, certain and definate.
With our maths partners we rolled a dice and used tally marks to record how often we rolled each number.

William P thought 3 would be the most rolled because he always gets threes when he plays snakes and ladders.

Sophie thought 6 would get the most rolls because it was on the dice. Lots of people agreed that 6 comes up a lot.

 

We had eleven different groups all testing the dice and different numbers were the winners for different groups. We talked about why...

Oliver said that he wanted four to win and sort of could roll it so four came up a lot. He liked trying to do it but he also said it is kind of cheating. Lots of groups agreed that they could make the dice land on a number sometimes but they couldn't every time. We all decided it wasn't a fair test to try to make the dice land on numbers but it was fun. 

We talked about chance. There was no chance of rolling numbers that were not on the dice. There are six numbers on the dice and you could roll any of those six numbers. We talked about 1 in 6 chance of rolling your favourite number. That each number has the same chance because there is one of each. William and Andrew said it was like fractions, you have 1/6 of a chance. In probability we say you have 1 in 6 chance of rolling each number on the dice.

 This week we changed the dice. Mrs Walker changed the 6 on our big classroom dice to a 1. We predicted that we would not roll any 6s. We were right.

We thought 1 would win because it had more chance but we kept rolling 4s. Oliver discovered that the dice had a funny corner and we noticed that it kept rolling to a four because of this. It was great to learn about fair testing but sort of ruined the point of Mrs Walker probability lesson. Next week we will change 4 to a 1 as well and see what happens.



It was great to hear about all the happy coin tossing completed at home last week. Next week we will change the odds and use two coins.