CK-12-Basic Probability and Statistics Concepts - A Full Course

3.6. Theoretical and Experimental Coin Tosses http://www.ck12.org

Denominator (Bottom)

The number of possible outcomes= 215

The number of possible outcomes = 32,768

Now you just divide the numerator by the denominator:

P(5 heads) =

3003

32768

P(5 heads) = 0. 0916

Therefore, the theoretical probability would be 9.16% of getting 5 heads when tossing 15 coins.

b. To calculate the experimental probability, let’s use the randBin function on the TI-84 calculator.

From the list, you can see that you only have 5 heads 1 time in the 10 trials.

Therefore, the experimental probability can be calculated as follows:

P(5 heads) =

1

10

=10%