Transparent Urns and Colored Tinker-cubes for Natural Stochastics in Primary School

We join the camp of mathematics educators who claim that children should receive early training in stochastic thinking, although their training – at such stage – may only be based on a heuristic understanding of stochastic phenomena. The term “heuristic” is to be taken in the sense propagated by scientists like Einstein and Polya, which is not as “a rule of thumb” but as a correct yet partial approximation of the normative approach. We present a review of empirical results supporting our claim and propose to guide children to construct stochastic situations enactively.