Moving almost entirely toward a flipped class. It’s easy when there are just 10 students and Tom (tutor) and I can circulate to help.

We started with three exercises from the text on independent event. With a little coaching most students could work out 1/256 as theera probability of 8 heads in a row. They had trouble figuring out the house advantage if that bet paid off at 250:1. I think the best way to do this is to imagine 256 plays of the game with one winner. Of course that’s unlikely, but correct in the long run and good enough to get the answer.

Working with one student on the chance of a 23% event occuring 12 times (check newspaper report that it’s about 1 in 50 million) I went round and round on several difficulties. The first was his reluctance(?) to multiply probabilities for independent events, even after many examples he believed. He just wanted to add them (and had trouble adding fractions). The second was his inability to see 23% as 0.23, and so just a fraction a little less than 1/4. The third was his admission that at the beginning of the class when I talked about some of this material he was checking his email and not listening …

Several groups of students made good progress on the false positive analysis of breast cancer testing from the Times blog.

I assigned this as the last question on the last homework.

Construct a final exam for this course. Collect five or six problems that when taken together cover a large part of what we’ve learned this semester. Some of them can be straightforward (but not obviously easy), some should be the hardest ones you know how to do. You can invent problems using numbers you find in the news, or use ones from the book. You can even use problems I assigned for homework.

Start each problem with a short discussion of why you chose it, what skills/topics it tests, what makes it interesting (to you).

Provide a solution to each problem you write.

 

---

blog home page