Exploring In Sample Space: Developing Young Children's Knowledge Of Randomness

This paper focuses on 6-8 year-old children's thinking about randomness. It reports the findings of a study in which the children engaged with a game-like environment to construct for themselves spatial representations of sample space. The system was designed so that the rules governing the relationships between the selection of elements of the sample space and the outcomes of the game were available for inspection and reconstruction by the children. In response to a range of tasks, the children manipulated the sample space in ways that generated corresponding outcomes in the game. We present a case study of children's activities, which illustrates how the novel medium mediates the children's expression and understanding of chance events.