In this lesson, students analyze the fairness of certain games by examining the probabilities of the outcomes.

The explorations provide opportunities to predict results, play the games, and calculate probabilities. Students should have had prior experiences with simple probability investigations, including flipping coins, drawing items from a set, and making tree diagrams. They should understand that the probability of an event is the ratio of the number of successful outcomes to the number of possible outcomes. This lesson was adapted from “Activities: Explorations with Chance,” which appeared in the April 1992 issue of the Mathematics Teacher.

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