Classroom resources spotlight: Hot Streaks

Published 20 March 2019

Hot Streaks has been in development for a while and we’re excited to release the new and improved Hot Streaks sequence!

Imagine flipping a coin fifty times. Does this seem like a plausible sequence of results?

HTHTT | HTTHT | HHHTT | HHTTH | HTTHT | THTTH | HTHHT | HTHTT | HHTHT | TTHHT1

In Lesson 1 students design strategies to distinguish between “real” and “fake” coinflip sequences, using spreadsheets and graphing software.

In Lesson 2 students explore the idea of the basketball “hot hand” effect – does scoring a goal make a player more likely to score their next goal? Students will apply their strategies from Lesson 1 to identify randomness in basketball results, using real data spanning sixteen years of NBA All-Star player Kevin Garnett’s career.

 

1This is very unlikely to be a genuine result—download the sequence to find out why!