Sam started probability with a twister spinner. The students caught on very quickly - because there are four equally likely possibilities of body part, each body part has a 1/4 theoretical probability of being chosen. Soon Sam continued on to the Shodor spinner application and showed the students experimental probability and how it comes closer to theoretical as the experiments are repeated. Sam had the students play Monty Hall - a game in which one player attempts to find a goal among three face-down cards. The way the game works is that the player picks a card at random. Monty (the dealer) then reveals all but one of the unselected cards. If the goal is unselected, it is the card that is not revealed, otherwise one random non-goal card is revealed. The player then has two options: Stick with his or her first choice, or switch to the only unrevealed card.
The students played the game a few times and tried to figure out for themselves the theoretical probability. Sam took their suggestion of 50% either way (it doesn't matter if you switch or stay) and gave his own theoretical analysis, 2/3 probability of winning with switch and 1/3 with stay. Then the students split into groups of two and played Monty Hall, recording their results. After the break, Sam showed the students how their many trials averaged together to come very close to 2/3 and 1/3 probability. Then Sam showed the students how to use the Shodor Interactivate Monty Hall applet, and they ran thousands of trials, achieving highly accurate experimental probabilities.
Next the students used colored candies to explore bar graphs. They lined up their candies in columns based on color and determined what color they had the most by looking at which column was the highest. The students took only a moment to realize that the spinner of Shodor's application was in fact a pie chart. Next Sam had the students open the Shodor Fire!! applet. The students ran the applet with increasing probability for one burning tree to catch another on fire and recorded the results. The students noted that they'd made an S-shaped graph, also known as a sigmoid or a logistic graph. Then finally the class concluded with a review of vocabulary.