Coin Tossing

You can use the Coin Tossing manipulative to explore many different chance processes.

For example, suppose you are observing a manufacturing process that produces a defective item 5 percent of the time and you are interested in how often the process will produce 2 defective items in a row. When this event occurs, it may be that quality control procedures require that the entire manufacturing process be shut down and inspected.

This process is really just coin tossing in disguise. Set the probability of heads to .05, let the longest run equal 2, and press Start to see what happens. Repeat this experiment again and again to get an idea of how long it usually takes to observe 2 defectives in a row.