Our Math (Un)Fair Experiences—Grade 6 Reflections

By Aria Braun and Zoe Dhami (6JC)
During the Math (Un)Fair we made a project that was about a basketball and plinko game, which we called “Dunked On!” Kids and parents that came would get to choose if they wanted to drop the ball down the plinko or shoot in the hoop. The experience was awesome—getting to watch kids have fun playing our game and getting to reward them with house points and hand stamps if they won. We were thrilled that so many kids and parents came to play our game; we had almost 100 people play our game. Our game was supposed to be an unfair game, so more people were meant to lose rather than win, but what we found really weird was more people won than lost and the odds came out 57% won and 43% lost. During the Math (Un)Fair, there were so many fun games to go play, like The Drop, Tropical Bounce, and Artist Valley. We would take turns going to play other games around the library. 

The Math (Un)Fair was an amazing experience that helped us learn about probability while having fun and teaching other students and parents about math. The building of our project, titled "Wolves Basketball," was crucial. After planning and revising for several weeks, we decided to base our game on basketball because both of us had an amazing experience on the Wolves U13 grade basketball team—we decided to connect school to our hobby. During the day of the math fair, we had planned for our game to be unfair but after the kids/adults played, we found out that out of the 184 people who played our game, 100 lost, 60 won and 24 people got the jackpot. The theoretical probability of losing was 60% but instead it was 54%, so our game turned out to be more fair than we originally thought. Overall, the math fair was an experience that we will never forget and we hope we inspired kids for the future.

Our game was called Pick a Pop. We made it look fair, but we didn’t tell people the probability of the lollipops. If we did, they would know how unfair our game actually was! The probability of losing was 15/25, and the probability of winning was 10/25. In the extension game, the probability of losing was 6/10, and the probability of winning was 3/10. We thought only 20 to 25 people would play our game, but do you know how many people actually played? One hundred and forty people played our game during the math fair! It was really fun watching everyone try to win our unbelievably hard game. In our opinion, the best part was when students and parents won the jackpot prize. It was awesome to see them celebrate and walk away with smiles on their faces instead of leaving empty handed. Overall, if we had the chance to experience the math fair again, we would definitely choose to do it again in a heartbeat.