We have to make our own "probability" game. Any ideas?

Question

We have to have:
supply list (actually we have to provide the supplies)
Object of the game (how do you know who wins)
Rules for playing and scoring
step by step directions of how to play
Description of "sample space and sample size" ?????
Discussion of how the game is fair......include the probability for each player to win.

Any ideas????

Answer 1

OK. Since they're talking about "sample space" or "sample size", they're talking about a game with very little strategy. ::sigh::

As to it being a "fair" game -- that sounds like it's best if it's like a gambling game, in which you play against the "house" (i.e., the "dealer" or "casino"). And they want the expected value of what a player wins or loses to be zero.

At least, that's if you said everything exactly correctly. If you misparaphrased a bit, that's a different matter ...

Since we're talking "fairness" and so on, you should use industrially-made things known to be physically fair, like dice, cards, coins, etc. Or identical objects one draws out of opaque bags.

Cheapest materials -- that might be if you devise a game that involves flipping a lot of pennies. I.e., if somebody throws 10 pennies onto a table, how many come up heads?

A less common idea -- take two spinners with color wheels, and the objective of the game is to match colors. Fairness would be affected by any imperfections in the size of the regions of each color. Friction in the spinning device itself would on the whole be less important.

For a pencil/paper idea -- make up a "master" set of cards with a bunch of different designs. The player chooses a design, and we see how well the two match.

If the design is filling in or not filling in squares in a grid, it has to be a SMALL grid or you can't easily cover all the choices in the master deck. E.g., if it's totally free choice on a grid with 8 squares, there are 2^8 = 256 possible designs. That's too many. Five choices in a cross gives 32 possible designs, which should be more manageable.