The Price is Right is a popular U.S. television game show in which contestants play product-pricing games in order to win prizes. Games involve some knowledge of prices, but many involve the element of chance as well. This paper describes a classroom activity I have designed to help teach probability concepts to students in an upper-level course. It is based on the television game show The Price is Right. This exercise is designed to help students better understand basic concepts such as probability rules, common distributions, and expectations. The exercise is intended for an upper-level statistics course, but could easily be adapted for use in an introductory statistics course as well. This paper describes The Price is Right classroom activity in detail. Student evaluations of the activity are also included.
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