Random Walks

A “random walk” can be thought of as a trip that is controlled by a coin flip. Building on the Trip Line model, if someone starts on the Trip Line at the “benchmark” (the point labeled “0”) and then flips a coin and if “heads” you take one step to the right and “tails” you take one step to the left, the path you take is called a random walk. Random walks will provide students an early experience of probability. In addition, having the class produce many “sample paths” will generate data sets that will be the source of an introduction to statistics. Students can “bet” on what the most likely landing spot would be after some number of coin flips and how probable it would be for a person to end up at a place after a certain number of coin flips. YPP has created random walk activities that are played on different mathematical objects: tree diagrams, circles with a discrete number of points on them, trip lines, and directed graphs.