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

 Monty Hall
Activity Title What Does Monty Hall Have to Do with Public Health?
Delivery Format In-person/Online synchronous instruction

High Impact Practices (HIPs) Categories

(Review definitions for each category(link is external))
  • 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 Activity In 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 Length 1-2 hours
Activity Details See handout. 

Topics