Probabilities through Games

The probability unit starts up on Monday for some of my classes.  I'm looking forward to it because it means I get a chance to test out Yahtzee as a mechanism for finding probabilities.  I have plenty of dice, all I need to do is print out a few of the scorecards (which can just be scanned and cut apart).  The other thing that I've been debating is Kismet or Zombie Dice (the only problem being that I don't have enough of them right now for a full classroom).

I currently would like to test this out by having students play the game for a few rounds each group (this might take the whole day).  From here we'll try to figure out whether the point scores make sense for each of the tiers or if we would need to modify them based on the likelihood of getting that particular roll.

I'm also thinking that I need to do something to emphasize the difference between experimental versus theoretical probability.  With my advanced class we generally go through the Monty Hall problem (there are a lot of simulations for this out there).  I'm not as certain what I should do for a freshman level course.  I think that drawing cards may be a good way to show it, but I don't know if students would buy into it much.  The other thing I had thought of was Toss the Pigs (though that wouldn't lend itself to a comparison between experimental and theoretical).

Finally, with geometric probability, we'll be dealing with dartboards.  This will require us to go through how to find the area of sectors of circles, but that shouldn't be a problem (and honestly they'd be able to do it without this anyways).

I anticipate this being a struggle for students.  They aren't used to thinking completely for themselves.  This is partly because of the general atmosphere from K-8 and partly because I haven't gotten as project heavy with Math 1 as I wanted this year due to a couple of problems (unrelated to the curriculum).  I also think it's a worthwhile thing to do.  School shouldn't produce students who rock at trivia but can't do anything else.  I'll be posting with updates of how this goes as the unit progresses.