What Does Monty Hall Have to Do with Public Health?

In this lab activity, students played the Monty Hall game to test their probability intuition, followed by an analytical review and a concluding exercise connecting it to real-world applications.

Author: Alejandro Schuler, Assistant Professor in Residence in Biostatistics

Course Number & Title: PBHLTH 241: Intermediate Biostatistics for Public Health

Grant Type: Teaching Excellence Colloquium (TEC)

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Details
Activity TitleWhat Does Monty Hall Have to Do with Public Health?
Delivery FormatIn-person/Online synchronous instruction

High Impact Practices (HIPs) Categories

(Review definitions for each category)

  • Collaborative Assignments and Projects
Learning Objectives
  • Recognize the fallacies of probabilistic intuition and the value of rigorous thinking in complex situations
  • Identify “populations” and “samples” in new situations and use them to reason probabilistically
Brief Summary of ActivityIn this lab activity, students play the Monty Hall game and challenge their intuition about probability before doing a rigorous analysis of the game. The activity begins with a probability mind-map to remind students of the lecture topics and concludes with an exercise that helps them tie the activities to the real world.
Activity Length1-2 hours
Activity DetailsSee handout. 
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