Goldfish and Probability

At the beginning of the semester in this course, we learned about the topic of probability and all of its aspects and effects on the world through using it in things like experiments and studies. To get a better understanding of how probabilities are determined, their properties, the definitions of mutually exclusive and non-mutually exclusive events, and experimental probabilities vs theoretical probabilities we did the healthy fish activity.

So, with this experiment, we each needed a bag of colored goldfish, and a gold worksheet (pics of both below). The fish in the sample represented healthy and sick fish.  The green fish were sick, and all of the other colored fish were healthy. We all opened our bags and started to separate them into groups by color to answer the questions in the worksheet. On a side note, it was really interesting to see how people decided to organize their fish as some people were very nit-picky as others didn't truly care how things were organized and that just truly shows how diverse every student is. And as a future teacher knowing how each individual student learns determines how you are going to set up your curriculum and teach and guide your students.

Part A of the worksheet addressed the counting and recording of the healthy fish, the sick fish, and the total number of the fish.
Part B is computing the probability of healthy and sick fish in the sample through using the numbers from Part A. Part A was very foundational because of the totals of the fish help you to create possibilities and put things together and start to make and discover predictions and possibilities.
Part C addresses computing the probability of something NOT occurring and asks how both questions relate to each other.
And finally, Part D and Part E put the activity into the context of a word problem or a real-life situation which brings back material and certain subjects from 256 which is proportions and word problems.

This activity truly reached all of the objectives and I came to a better understanding of how probability works. It also was a great activity opener to understanding the vocabulary and how to apply probability to the real world and even how to use this activity in my future classroom.

Helpful link: http://www.mathgametime.com/subject/probability
This link takes you to a website that has games on probability, videos explaining probability, and lesson plans for probability and for grades K-7.

 (Healthy Fish Activity Worksheet)



































(Type of goldfish to buy for the activity)