Plan: Start with the H/T grid experiment. Then on to independence, Poisson processes.

I think it went well. There were only 13 students present, which made for a much more interactive class. In the grid experiment everyone followed directions – that’s unusual, so I must have done a better job giving them (or else following directions is modeled by Bernoulli trials and I got lucky this time – luck happens is the whole point of the class). There were 12 runs of four counting horizontally, with about 80 expected. (I did the expected count after the first round of counting.) Then we counted vertically, and found about 50 runs. I think folks really did understand why.

I defined independence (very roughly) and illustrated the product rule, without pushing it. Then I asked for the probability of 10 heads in a row. Several said “can’t happen” or “the odds are so small its as good as never”. Computed 1/2^10 ~ 1/1000. Many still thought that was small enough to ignore.

 

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