Contributed paper list


   (Tuesday 13th, 08:20-09:20)

A statistical game: the silent cooperation problem

Authors

Ernesto Sánchez, Alejandro Hernández

Presenter

Ernesto Sánchez (Mexico)

Abstract

In this paper an activity based on the following problem (Mosteller, 1965) is presented: Two strangers are separately asked to choose one of the positive integers and advised that if they both choose the same number, they both get a prize. If you were one of these people, what number would you choose? Some taste of statistical thinking and informal inference reasoning might be experienced by the students/teachers with this problem. Fifty-four teachers from different school levels participated in a two sessions experiment. In the first session, pairs of teachers were formed and each thought of a number in such way that they could not predict what number would be thought by his/her partner. The numbers thought were gathered, graphed in a distribution and analyzed. In the second, without advised in advance, the same experience was repeated. Distributions, patterns of variation, and making decisions are some themes that emerged.