#Galton board diy download#

You can download a Word document with the arrows/questions. These were what the students would be using to trace their paths through the Galton Board. I needed something to use as blocks to make our graph, so I brought down a box of videotapes and placed it at the pointy end of the Galton board.įinally, I randomly generated sheets with 100 arrows in rows of 10, which had questions to consider printed on the back. I also set up a table beyond that last row, with labels 0 to 10, in order to build our graph. Then I drew big numbers 0 to 10 above the last row. I carefully drew connecting lines in yellow for left and blue for right (it was easiest to do this diagonally in one colour and then in the other colour). I started by drawing a giant Galton board on the ground in chalk, making sure it had 11 circles at its widest end. All I needed was a way for them to get instructions for which way to go, which I knocked together on the train journey to work. Then I realised that the people could tread the path multiple times and create a graph of where they had arrived by stacking up some sort of block.

(It also goes by the name “quincunx”, but I was not going to use that word with high school students!) My idea was that you could achieve this with human bodies walking paths, but there was still a problem of not having enough people to create the graph using “bins”. The Galton Board is a device that is used to illustrate the binomial distribution, usually with little balls falling through grid of pegs where the balls bounce back and forth from one peg to another, to come to rest in little bins at the bottom. Then, on the morning of the day the students were coming, I had an inspiration and quickly knocked together the Human Galton Board. I still dearly wanted to do a moving maths activity, and I still wanted it to be about probability, but I wasn’t sure what to do. Last week we were booked in to do Human Markov Chains with several groups of school students, but it turned out there would be a lot fewer of them than we expected, and I didn’t think Human Markov Chains would work very well with under 20 students.

Galton board diy