Lesson Plan: The Gumball Machine
Alexander White, M. Alejandra Sorto, and Rini Oktavia
(Grades K–12+) Originally published in April 2014, this lesson gives students the opportunity to explore and discuss the variation that occurs in sampling. Students are asked to imagine a gumball machine contains 1 red, 2 green, 3 yellow, and 4 blue gumballs that were thoroughly mixed before they were put into the machine. Then, students are asked several questions about the probabilities of certain events occurring. They make predictions and conduct experiments of sample sizes 10 and 20 before making dotplots as a class to discuss the variability across the samples and compare them to their original predictions.
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