Discrete Math - Day 19

Today was focused on providing practice in working through probability problems. After a brief review of representing probabilities, how conditional probabilities look in these representations, and Bayes theorem, students worked through 10 problems.

I use a subset of questions from Basic Ideas in Probability on education.com. These problems provide a nice mixture of conditional probabilities, independence issues, and Bayes theorem.

Students typically struggle with wording of questions, trying to decipher what exactly is the sample space and what is the event of interest. Overall the class did well on these, although there are still issues with using Bayes theorem.

I think we'll spend some more time working through a couple more problems involving Bayes theorem and take a look at mathematical induction. This latter topic fits into the question of how do you know that a formula will always work. We'll revisit some of the work on figurate numbers to answer this question.

Visit the class summary for a student's perspective of the class and to view the lesson slides.