Playing with Probabilities in AP Stats

In a world where you can “trade the future” on sites like Kalshi, it’s important to understand how probability works and how, no matter how smart you may think yourself to be, there is no predicting the future. That ten-pick parlay is not going to hit, so don’t even bother. 

And so on Thursday afternoon I found myself sitting in on Julie Venne’s AP Statistics class in lower PRISM and learning a thing or two about probability from her students. 

As a capstone project for their unit on probability, Ms. Venne challenged her students to develop original multi-player games that utilized four different types of probability in their design - for example, a coin flip (Bernoulli trial), drawing dominos from a bag without replacement (conditional probability), and with replacement (probability of independent events), things along these lines. 

Students developed games that were quite fun to play. Senior Clem M.’s game, which he calls Coin Roll but Mr. Tulio calls Clemopoly, is a riff on Chutes and Ladders. Teddy R. dreamt up something he calls A Future of Chance that has a 1-in-96 chance of ending on the first turn. Lauren B. ’27 revamped the cardgame War, while Brooklyn B. ’26 and Addison O. ’26 invented the counting game Comically Big, which utilized comically a big deck of cards and an even more comically big die. 

What was cool to see were the connections students made as we played each game. Seeing theory become practice, the idea of a game becoming a game being played out in real time and space, students were quick to recognize where their games were flawed and recommend changes that would improve player experience. I asked Clem what the dominant strategy for Clemopoly was, which led to a pause in gameplay and an interesting bit of conversation about different approaches to winning. 

Each creator was also responsible for calculating the probabilities for different game outcomes.