It is not unusual today - even among people who consider probability as a concern of pure mathematics - to start a probability course with an attempt to uncover the experimental roots of the probability concept. In fact, it is not a new feature. The story about tossing a coin with the happy result of a fair distribution of heads and tails in the long run has been the custom for quite a long time. What is new about it, is that the story is dramatized and acted out - I mean, by the author or the textbook. Maybe even the teachers or the students are expected to try out this experiment - following the highly encouraging examples given by the textbook authors. It is a pity that by showing one experiment without asking themselves whether it is typical, textbook authors lead the teachers up the wrong path and help to create wrong attitudes towards probabilistic problems.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education