Imagine a school assembly with 250 students. Everyone stands up and
flips a coin. People with tails sit down. People with heads flip
again.
Do you think anyone will get 6 heads in a row?
How many heads in a row do you expect the last one standing to have
flipped?
Can you explain your reasoning?
Here is an animation for you to explore what happens when different
sizes of assembly gather and carry out the experiment.
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Now that you have had the chance to explore, do your answers
and reasoning to the questions above change at all?
What is the probability of flipping ten heads in a row?
How many people would you need to have in a school assembly for you
to expect there to be someone still standing after ten flips?
Here are some related questions you might like to consider:
The probability of winning the lottery jackpot if you buy one
ticket is approximately 1 in 14 million.
There are usually two jackpot winners every week. How many tickets
do you think are sold each week?
On October 7th 2010, a woman gave birth to her third child. Her
first two children were also born on October 7th, in 2005 and 2007.
So all three children in the family have the same birthday. The
odds of this happening were incorrectly reported in the newspapers
as being 1 in 48 million. Can you work out the correct
probability?
There are more than a million families in the UK with three
children.
Would you expect there to be other families with three children who
share a birthday?
The television performer Derren Brown once filmed himself
flipping ten heads in a row for a programme about horse racing and
unlikely events. He used a fair coin, and kept filming until he got
ten in a row. How long do you think it took him?