Teamwork

Today's puzzler was another dice game, in which we identified another pattern. This puzzler was much harder than the last one, and the entire class struggled with it until Dawson gave us actual dice to use as model. The name of the game was "Polar bears. The come in pairs. They fish through holes in the ice." The riddle was that polar bears encircled a central dot, so only three and five counted for the number of polar bears. For every roll with a central dot, the value of the face opposite of the roll with the central dot was the number of fish.

After the puzzler, we were given more notes on combinatorics, this time combinatorial probability. We had group work, and I was with the twins in my class. The classroom atmosphere is so different here, where people collaborate much more, and students actually pull their own weight in group projects. The group assignment that took up most of class time was a worksheet, in which we had to use combinatorics to find the probability of every single poker hand. My group was the first to finish, so we had to do the same thing using two poker decks at the same time. I went back to my dorm to fetch a sweater (it was cold in the classroom) and two packs of cards, because they were extremely useful in modeling the poker hands.

At the end of class, we had study hall yet again. It was my turn to speak with Dawson about my project, and he gave me a couple of things to include in my lecture. I need to budget my time carefully, and I need to include more extensive vocabulary.