Simple Probability Simulation Demonstration

This little demonstration is a way of teaching children basic probability concepts. It was designed by Will Hess for a school project to teach the students in the elementary schools important concepts of probability in a fun engaging way. 

The program works by first assigning a fair die and a rigged die. Depending on the age of the children you may need to explain what a rigged and fair mean. The rigged die will have 1 side be favored and come up 20% - 30% of the time as opposed to the roughly 1/6 probability of each side on the fair die. The roll button basically gets random number from 1-6 and displays it for the fair die, and does the same for the rigged die (except using the rigged probability). The simulation part repeats this process 1000000 times and shows the user the counts for each number in each die. 

If you are using this to teach kids, first have them roll the dice a couple times and have them pick. If they're picking one die over the other now, try guiding them into picking can't tell and explain why. Next up, try getting the kids to tell you what would make them more sure. If they aren't sure explain that they only took 3 or 4 rolls before, and hint that more rolls are the option. Once they get it, click next and have them all agree that one million rolls is the best option. Then explain how 1000000 rolls would be very unreasonable for humans to do, but computers can simulate stuff like this in less than a second. Once they see the results it should be pretty obvious which die has the rigged side and they will select that die. You can also ask them to say which side comes up most often, which again should be pretty obvious, even to them. At this point you should also explain to them why this happens and briefly mention the law of large numbers and how increasing a sample size produces more statistically significant results.