Integrating educational dialogue into a classic random walk activity

This work reframes the classic 1-D random walk problem to provide structured opportunities for developing students’ educational dialogue skills. By focusing on the rare events that can happen across 20 rounds of European roulette, students can be tasked to construct, describe and search for sequences of events across a large dataset. This enhances, rather than detracts from the mathematical andprogramming skills traditionally developed by modelling such problems. This work therefore seeks to emphasise the opportunities that likely already exist in curricula which can embed opportunities for students to deliberately practice their educational dialogue skills, skills that are often overlooked in traditional Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) courses.