Fun activities to teach statistics and probability + stats freebie!

Tuesday 21 December 2021
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Many students find maths class to be an intimidating place, and new research shows that self-confidence in maths seems to degrade with age, particularly for girls. In particular, social comparison and teacher expectations hold a lot of influence; fortunately, this means that as a teacher or as a parent, you can play an important role in turning that fear of maths around.

Statistics and Probability really lends itself to fun activities, because the concepts behind statistics and probability have so many real-life applications, and can be easy (and even fun!) to explore when they’re framed with examples and put into practice. These games can help transform classroom learnings into exciting maths activities, and help build confidence at this crucial age. By making Statistics and Probability fun, we like the odds that your young learners will feel confident and proud in their math classroom, this year and into the future!

Statistics Activities

Tally charts are a key dimension of Australian Curriculum Maths; they’re also a whole lot of fun, because you can make a tally chart out of practically any dataset, and kids love sharing their opinions and eliciting the opinions of their classmates. Your young learners will love learning how to conduct surveys, collect & record data and represent it via tally marks, and how to keep track of numbers in groups of five. You can also tailor the activity to various questions (from favourite colours, number of siblings, birth months, to questions tailored to children’s interests like favourite TV shows, etc.) Data collected for tally charts can also be adapted to use column graphs, line graphs, tables, pictographs, pie charts and other forms. By getting students walking around the room asking questions, and involving them in deciding what questions to ask, it’s a great activity to get everyone moving around and re-engaged when they’re starting to drift, or an impromptu activity for when your lesson has finished a bit early than expected!

There’s also plenty of chart games out there that let you collect data interactively – for example, we love the PBS Kids game Hat Grab, where data collection involves Curious George grabbing hats from unsuspecting passersby! SoftSchool’s Pictograph game is another fun activity which gives your students the opportunity to interpret data from a pictograph by answering five questions.

Older students (Year 4+) will love interacting with 2011 Census data at the ABS ConCensus page, which also includes MyCensus, a tool that can be used individually and in classroom groups to create your own census and visualise the data you collect.

Probability Activities

Game of Chance (Source: Education.com)

This is a simple game you can play with just a deck of cards, teaching your student how to create a "level playing field" by measuring fairness through probability. It’s an experiment demonstrating what happens when a game of chance starts with the odds stacked against you, and how the game can be changed to give both players an equal chance to win.

How to Play:

Shuffle the deck and place one card face down on a table.
Ask the student to turn the card over. If it's a diamond, he gets to keep it. If it's not a diamond, you get to keep it. Continue playing for 10 rounds and see who has the most cards after play has concluded.
Ask the student if they think the game is fair. Why not? Since a deck of cards has four suits, there's a 25% chance a diamond will come up. This means, there's a 75% chance that the dealer will win. How can the game be made fairer?
This time, deal two cards at the same time. How does this alter the odds of probability? What if they get to keep diamonds and clubs?
Ask the student to come up with other ways to play the game which would also be mathematically fair.

Jellybean Probability (Source: Educationworld.com)

Jellybeans make a fun and colourful way to bring probability to life! (Just remind the kids not to eat them, since many people will be handling them. You may want to provide a few extra jellybeans or alternate treats when the activity is finished, though, since it’s hard to play with jellybeans and resist eating any!) This is a two-player game, but should ideally be played in a classroom or similarly-sized group so that there’s a significant enough dataset to draw conclusions. Each pair of students receives three jellybeans -- two of one color and one of another color -- in a small paper cup. For this explanation, we’ll assume 2 red jellybeans and 1 green jellybean are in the cup.

How to Play:

Ask students which colour of jellybean they’re most likely to pick if they picked just one of the three jellybeans out of the cup without looking. Why do they think this is the case? (Since there’s two red jellybeans and 1 green jellybean in this hypothetical cup, the probability is that they will pick a red one.) Have them test out their theory. How many students picked a red jellybean? Did more students pick a red jellybean than a green one? Did two-thirds of the students pick a red one?
Ask students to hypothesise how likely it is that the students who picked red the first time, will pick the second red jellybean on their next pick. Why do they think this is the case? (Because the cup now contains one jellybean of each colour, the probability is 50:50 that they’ll pick a red one.) Have them test their theory. How many the students picked the red jellybean? Did an equal number of students pick a red jellybean and a green one?
Ask students: if you picked all three of the jellybeans out of the cup one at a time, what are the possible sequences in which you might pick them? (They could pick the red ones twice, followed by the green jellybean (RRG); red, green and then red (RGR); or the green one first and then two red ones (GRR)). Ask students to hypothesize about which of those three possibilities is most likely to occur, and which is least likely. Have students divide a sheet of paper into three columns and, at the top of each column, record one of the three possible combinations of jellybeans.

RRG RGR GRR

Next, students will pick the jellybeans from the cup one at a time. They will record the results by putting a checkmark in one of the three columns. Did their hypothesis prove true? Ask your students to share how many times they picked each combination of jellybeans. Has any pattern formed? (For example, did more students always draw a red jellybean first? Did the three different combinations occur in roughly equal proportions?) Were the results consistent from person to person?

For students in Upper Primary, this activity can be tweaked by adding in a more advanced version. Show your students a bowl of jellybeans, which should contain jellybeans of only two colours in equal numbers (for example, 100 red jellybeans and 100 green ones).

Let your students know that there’s an equal number of the two colours of jellybeans in the bowl. Blindfold students one at a time and let them choose ten jellybeans from the bowl. Ask students to predict how many of each color they’ll pick from the bowl. (The probability is that each student will select the same number -- five -- of each colour.)
After every student has selected 10 jellybeans, ask the students to review their data: How many students selected 5 red and 5 green jellybeans? 6 red and 4 green or 4 red and 6 green? 7 red and 3 green or 3 red and 7 green? Ask your students to chart the results of all their selections. Did the results prove or disprove your students' hypotheses?

Introducing: the Problem-Solving Strategies and Skills Series!

Problem-solving is a vital skill that students need to develop from a young age, and our Problem-solving strategies and skills series is just the ticket! Students will develop strategies to solve: differentiated math-related word problems logic problems spatial reasoning problems and patterning problems. This best-selling series includes box sets of fun problems to solve spanning Measurement & Geometry, Numbers and Algebra, and Statistics and Chance, and it’s been used in many an Aussie home and classroom to make maths fun! The box sets are full of colourful, engaging problems that relate to real-world situations, and they’re bound to build confidence in your young learners and have them looking forward to maths class.

Fun activities to teach statistics and probability + stats freebie!