California State University, Fullerton, partnered with local schools to offer a special program to introduce middle school students to a college campus and encourage future enrollment in college preparatory classes. As part of that program, I was asked to present a one-hour mathematics lesson to various groups of students. I decided to teach a lesson on probability because it offers hands-on experience for students and because middle school students should be able to “understand and apply basic concepts of probability” (NCTM 2000, p. 248). Based on previous teaching experience as well as work with over 300 students (10 groups of 30) who visited our campus, I found that middle school students have a good sense of the concept of the probability of an event. Many students have had experience simulating experiments by repeatedly tossing a coin, rolling a number cube, or drawing a chip from a bag. Furthermore, they can write probabilities for events, such as “get a tail”; “roll a 3”; or “draw a green chip” from a bag containing three green chips and two white chips, respectively. With this in mind, I introduced the Coat Check problem to build on that knowledge and introduce middle school students to a more complex form of simulation to estimate probabilities. In this article, I will share my methods and results so that middle school mathematics teachers can replicate the lesson.
A hands‐on introduction to medical physics and radiation therapy for middle school students
