Educating Children in Stochastic Modeling: Games with Stochastic Urns and Colored Tinker-cubes

It is an established opinion that young children have good probabilistic intuitions although their mental framework for reasoning probabilistically may be fragmentary and even contain inconsistencies. We join the camp of mathematics educators who advocate an early training in stochastic thinking. We recognize, however, that such early training can only be based on a heuristic approach to stochastics. The heuristic approach that we propose here is implemented by guiding children to actively construct stochastic situations by means of plastic tinker-cubes and stochastic urns. The aim of this enactive training is to foster the development of a dynamic mental imagery for representing stochastic situations.