Middle Grades Math: Long Run

Objectives

• Students will conduct simulations with multiple trials.
• Students will use relative frequencies to compute experimental probabilities.
• Students will informally explore the use of a simulation to observe long-run relative frequencies.

Vocabulary

• Law of Large Numbers
• frequency
• relative frequency
• experimental probability
• theoretical probability
• scatter plot
• connected scatter plot
• trial
• simulation

About the Lesson

This lesson involves investigating simulations used to observe long-run relative frequencies.
As a result, students will:

• Simulate drawing blue and red marbles one at a time from a bag.
• Generate a scatter plot of the relative frequencies of blue marbles.
• Examine variations in the scatter plots generated by the simulations.
• Determine and discuss any consistent patterns or trends found in the results of these simulations.