The Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM 1989) states in Standard 11 for grades 9 through 12 that students should have oportunities to "use experimental and theoretical probabilities to represent and solve problems involving ncertainty." Standard 1 emphasizes the importance of students' learning to "formulate problems from situations within and outside mathematics." This article discusses a simply stated problem involving uncertainty that students can investigate experimentally or theoretcially. The problem places students in the role of problem formulator by giving them opportunities to generate various interesting problems of their own on the basis of a given situation. By changing certain characteristics of the original problem, students can be introduced to some fundamental concepts of decision making in two -player games.
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