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• Interdisciplinary Secondary-School Workshop: Physics and Statistics

  179-194

  Péter Fejes Tóth

  Péter Vankó

  Manfred Borovcnik

  Views:

  55

  The paper describes a teaching unit of four hours with talented students aged 15-18. The workshop was designed as a problem-based sequence of tasks and was intended to deal with judging dice whether they are regular or loaded. We first introduced the students to the physics of free rotations of rigid bodies to develop the physics background of rolling dice. The highlight of this part was to recognise that cubes made from homogeneous material are the optimal form for six-sided objects leading to equal probabilities of the single faces. Experiments with all five regular bodies would lead to similar results; nevertheless, in our experiments we focused on regular cubes. This reinsures that the participants have their own experience with the context. Then, we studied rolling dice from the probabilistic point of view and – step-by-step – by extending tasks and simulations, we introduced the idea of the chi-squared test interactively with the students. The physics and the statistics part of the paper are largely independent and can be also be read separately. The success of the statistics part is best described by the fact that the students recognised that in some cases of loaded dice, it is easier to detect that property and in other cases one would need many data to make a decision with small error probabilities. A physical examination of the dice under inspection can lead to a quick and correct decision. Yet, such a physical check may fail for some reason. However, a statistical test will always lead to reasonable decision, but may require a large database. Furthermore, especially for smaller datasets, balancing the risk of different types of errors remains a key issue, which is a characteristic feature of statistical testing.

  Subject Classification: F90, K90, M50, R30

• Supporting the theory of math didactic using knowledge-measuring questions and analysis of the solutions

  1-16

  Sándor Kántor

  Péter Fejes-Tóth

  Views:

  28

  New or rediscovered results presented in this paper are the results of the analysis of the problem sets used in the two-tier system secondary school final examination in mathematics, a system that was introduced in Hungary in 2005.
  Many of the revealed problem arise in connection with misunderstanding the text of the problems. Causes of misinterpretation can be either that the text is lacking some important information, or that it should be interpreted not in word-to-word manner.
  Theses and their argumentations presented here refer partly on the new types of problems (tests, non-standard mathematical contents), and partly on improvement of learning-teaching process in topics of equations and approximations.