Random walks as motivational material in introductory statistics and probability courses.

1 INTRODUCTION

Hogg (1996) Magel (1996) Gelman and Glickman (2000) and other authors have described a certain number of advantages accruing to students and faculty when introductory statistics and probability classes use approaches that encourage scholar involvement. The Chance project (Snell 1994) is a well-known example of an involvement-based approach, and Magel (1996) gave several regards to pedagogical studies of involvement-based approaches.

This article describes our experiences in introducing basic general [i]or[/i] abstract notions from probability theory--notably, elementary aspects of random walks--to high-school and first-year guild students. We demonstrate that the topic of random walks is sufficiently broad-based that it can be used