Rock, Paper, Scissors!

I absolutely loved playing rock, paper, scissors in elementary school so when Roxanne (our college professor) told us yesterday that we were going to play it in class, I was so excited. I thought to myself, "oh I got this." We had to play 45 times in a row with a partner. I was awful at first! I couldn't concentrate on what to pick because I was keeping track of each round and counting 1, 2, 3 for when we would reveal our sign. So I blame my failure on the distractions. But as we kept playing, I got better! Over all, I won by 4 rounds! Woo Hoo! I am still a champion. On a side note, I actually played my dad later that day (winner got the cookies) I schooled him because of all of the extra practice! haha. Anyway, you are probably thinking "what does this have to do with math?" and it has everything to do with math! In this case, probability! We used this activity to find experimental probabilities and to make a tree diagram to calculate theoretical probabilities. Through experimental probability, we found that our game was very close to fair, but not perfectly fair because we almost had equal probabilities for the chances that I win, my partner wins, and a tie. (To be fair means that all the outcomes probabilities are equal). Through making a theoretical probability matrix, we found that this game is a fair game because the outcomes all have the same likelihood of happening. It was really fun to see that you can use probability for almost any game or activity!

I win!!