7.1 7.2 2026.3 normal curve introduction with dice groups

This builds off of the concept piloted spring 2026 which used students rolling a single die to generate data columns each of which is a uniform distribution and then the sum is a normal distribution. The result was statistically illustrative but opaque to the students. The whole business of summing arbitrary columns didn't make intuitive sense for a student with no background in probability. Better to have students rolling one die, two dice, three dice, and so forth, entering the sums into columns on the spreadsheet. Then do histograms of these columns. The complication is that those rolling five dice will be vastly slower than those rolling one die. Teams of two are needed.

Six groups could be formed. Whether there should be a six die group or a second group of five is yet to be determined. Six dice have 279,936 outcomes and a sum of 36.


The students were all added to a Google Sheets spreadsheet as editors. Maireen arrived early and was given five dice. Estele was next to arrive and took over rolling the five dice. 


Jai was given three dice to roll.


Henry Mae rolled four dice. She worked solo alongside Jai.


Delaura Dolly tackled rolling two dice, again, working alone. 


Jehzy had a single die. 


Elsin was given a separate column from Henry Mae and was tasked with rolling four dice. His data would later be copied and pasted underneath Henry Mae's data to give four dice a larger sample size.


Jermaia had three dice, data that was added to Jai's data later. 

The results were displayed on the board. Prior to generating the histograms, the instructor made predictions on the white board. 


A histogram was generated for each column, with the class widths adjusted to be integer values. The width was also increased for higher numbers of dice.


Jehzy had 200 rolls of one die and a relatively uniform distribution.

Maireen and Estele attained a reasonably normal distribution on 103 rolls of five dice. The class with was set to four. Their sample size grew the slowest, with 103 rolls taking until 9:25 AM. The exercise would benefit from having more groups working on five dice or even higher numbers of dice. Which means acquiring more dice. 



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