2. Newer Sports at LHS Ice Hockey Men’s Volleyball Fencing (club) Coin Flipping

3. Coin Flipping Team Coach Frew has been hired as the coach for the LHS inaugural coin flipping team. Since the coin flipping team is brand new, the team has no athletes. Is anyone interested in going out for the coin flipping team? We need volunteers!!!

4. Tryouts The goal of coin flipping competitions is to flip more heads than the team from the other school. To try out for the team, flip a coin five times and try to get as many heads as possible. The athletes that flip the most heads will become members of the varsity squad. Let’s experiment!

5. AthletePerformance(# of heads)

6. Tryouts Were these tryouts fair? Were the people who were cut really worse at flipping coins? The good and bad performances were a result of random chance.

7. Tryouts What do you think would happen if we let each athlete flip the coin a hundred times? How about a thousand times? All athletes should be close to 50% heads 50% represents the ability of the athletes to flip heads. However, with the small number of flips (sample size), their performances varied quite a bit, just due to random chance.

8. Other sports The coin flipping example might be a bit silly, but what if this pertained to basketball, specifically free throw shooting? Let’s say a players ability to make a free throw is 80%. If she took a thousand shots, how many would you expect her to make? What if she only took 10 free throws? Her performance could vary greatly just by random chance, even if her ability never changed. She could make 5 out of 10. The poor performance is possibly due to random chance.

9. Definitions Performance: an observed value that describes what the athlete actually did in a specific context (example: flipping a coin 5 times) Ability: a true but unknown value that describes what the player would do if given an infinite number of opportunities in the same context (example: flipping a coin millions of times) Random chance: the variation between an athlete’s performances and his or her ability