What quantity did you change?
Labs / Mathematics
Galton Board
Each ball takes a fresh coin flip at every peg — left or right — and lands in a bin counting how many times it went right. One ball is unpredictable, but pour hundreds and their bell-shaped pile is startlingly regular: the binomial distribution converging on the normal curve. Press and hold on the board to pour a stream.
Labs / Mathematics / Galton Board
Galton Board
Each ball takes a fresh coin flip at every peg — left or right — and lands in a bin counting how many times it went right. One ball is unpredictable, but pour hundreds and their bell-shaped pile is startlingly regular: the binomial distribution converging on the normal curve. Press and hold on the board to pour a stream.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
Mathematics helps us describe patterns precisely and predict what comes next. This model turns an abstract relationship into something you can change and observe.
Explore
Try the model
balls 0μ — · pred 6.00σ — · pred 1.73
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- With a fair board, why does the middle bin fill fastest while the edges stay nearly empty?
- Nudge the bias toward the right. Which way does the whole pile slide, and does its width change too?
- Add more rows. Do the measured mean μ and spread σ track the predicted values more closely or less?
- Only a handful of balls have fallen — how ragged is the histogram, and how many does it take to lock onto the curve?
- Which bias makes the pile widest? What value of p pushes σ to its largest?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
State the pattern in words, test it with another example, and then connect it to the mathematical rule or representation shown in the model.
Check
Before you leave
What pattern did you observe?
Does the pattern work for another example?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.