The Gizmo Gazette

News from ExploreLearning.com

May 2009

Expert's Corner: Carnival Probability

featuring Lisa Bickel

Lisa Bickel is the National Training Consultant (Mathematics) for ExploreLearning with a background in educational publishing. Lisa holds a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Pennsylvania State University, and has led the development of math textbooks and software for middle school and high school students.

When I lead Gizmo training workshops, I like to suggest ways for teachers to bring in current events and make learning with Gizmos even more fun. What better way to celebrate spring than to have a Gizmo Spring Carnival! You can challenge your students to use different Gizmos and award tickets, or prizes, for wins.

Spring carnivals are popular at many schools. Games and prizes - a great way to celebrate the end of the school year - and the end of state testing! School carnivals also offer an opportunity to talk about games from a mathematical perspective.

What makes a game fair? In a fair game, a player is equally likely to win or lose. Consider the game shown:

Double your fun! Only 1 ticket to play! Spin the spinner twice and multiply the numbers. Win 2 tickets if the product is odd.

It sounds fair, doesn't it? It's actually not. Because the player wins when the product is odd, the player has a huge disadvantage. Of the 36 possible products, only 9 are odd, so the probability of winning 2 tickets is one-fourth, or 0.25.

To make this game fair, the expected value must be zero. In this case, 3 tickets should be paid for winning. You can see this by finding the expected value of this game. Multiply the probability of winning and the number of tickets won. Multiply the probability of losing and the number of tickets lost. Then add.

Expected value = (P(winning) × tickets won) + (P(losing) × tickets lost)
= (0.25 × 3) + (0.75 × −1)
= 0

What better way to celebrate spring (and the end of state testing) than to have a Gizmos Spring Carnival! You can challenge your students to use different Gizmos and award prizes. Here are a few Gizmos that will work. Have fun!

Try these Gizmos, and others, at a spring carnival in your classroom:

Spin the Big Wheel (Probability) - Have students create a fair game and run the game with 1000 spins. Award prizes for the game with the closest experimental and theoretical probabilities.

Target Sum Card Game (Multi-digit Addition) - Have students play several times and award prizes for landing closest to the target.

Cannonball Clowns (Number Line Estimation) - Have students estimate a distance (such as from New York City to Paris). Award prizes for the closest clown launch to that distance.

Go Gizmos!

New Demonstration Movies

All of our Elementary Science Gizmos now have demonstration movies! These two-minute movies are great for both teachers and students and provide an excellent overview of the major features and functions of the Gizmo. To see one of these demo movies, click on the "demo" icon at the bottom left corner of any Elementary Science Gizmo, in the purple bar.

Coming soon...Elementary Math Gizmo demo movies. We hope to have all 40 of these movies completed by the end of 2009.

Gizmo Clothing and Gadgets

You can buy awesome ExploreLearning Gizmos merchandise to sport to class or around town. Everything from t-shirts to tote bags is available. We even have baby bibs for toddlers!

Visit the ExploreLearning Pro Shop

As always, if you have questions or comments about anything in this newsletter, please let us know. Drop us a line at http://www.explorelearning.com/supportform.