“Let’s Travel” - A Proposal for a Game about Probability, for the Sixth Grade of Elementary School

This qualitative study has designed to examine how the game “Let’s travel” could help with the development of the following cognitive demands: understanding the principles of randomness, sample space and comparing probabilities. Twenty-eight students from the Sixth Grade of Elementary School participated in this research. The theoretical principles that this activity was based on were the curriculum guidelines, the use of games as a teaching method, the guiding principles of teaching and learning about probability and cognitive demand. We found that the majority of students were able to recognize the sample space and we could also see that they intuitively associated the idea of randomness with luck. We also found that most students could compare probabilities by analyzing the sample space, without making any calculations. Our analysis of the results showed that this game, with intervention and support from the teacher, was a valid way of helping the students develop the cognitive demands mentioned above.