Modeling Random Binomial Rabbit Hops

Chapter
First Online:
Part of the International Perspectives on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematical Modelling book series (IPTL)

Abstract

Six fourth-grade students engaged in data modeling to make sense of the pattern of variability in binomial distributions. The students modeled five random rabbit-hops by tossing a fair coin to determine the most likely locations of the rabbits along a number line ranging from –5 to +5. To make sense of their empirical distributions, the students generated inscriptions of “paths” showing the possible ways to get to each final location and used these both to prove why certain locations were impossible and why central locations were more likely than extreme ones. Using the NetLogo Model (Wilensky, 1998) also helped some students to notice a particular distribution shape (i.e., a symmetric mound shape) in large number of trials. One student, for example, used the results of the NetLogo simulation to explain the distribution shape and to quantify the probability distribution in terms of the “number of ways” the events could occur.

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Notes

Acknowledgment

Writing this paper was enabled through the support by the grant ESI-0454754 from the National Science Foundation (ModelChance Project).

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.University of Massachusetts AmherstAmherstUSA

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