I enjoyed looking into counter intuitive maths which is being able to look into things that we believe to be true within mathematics yet is not necessarily the way we think.
First, we looked at the flipping of a coin and how as humans we would see this as being 50/50 as we as humans do not fully understand the meaning on Random. Our idea of random is not random at all as we don’t see random as having a possibility for a streak (landing on heads multiple times). As the probability with flipping a coin is 50/50 therefore the result of flipping a coin should be similar.
Problem solving and how many socks to make a pair activity. not until this activity did I realise my ability to over complicate a very simple problem from thinking the answer is ‘too obvious’. I recall back to school days and having to sit a standard grade general paper in mathematics and finding it more difficult than the general paper as I was trying to make it more difficult than it was. This is where I feel most of my maths anxiety comes from.
The final activity we looked at was the goat and car experiment which looks at a choice of three cups two of which have goat and one has a car underneath. Within this experiment it was seen that changing your answer once a cup was taken away increased your chances of getting the car. This was down to the probability of your original choice being 1/3 and if you change your decision after one being taken away it changes to 1/2. I found this interesting and tried it one people at home most of which said they would have originally stuck with their first choice like I has said before this experiment.
I found this input very interesting and would use these experiments with the children within my classroom in the future as I feel like it would be a good thing for them to explore.