The Cereal Box Problem:

• If you bought 15 boxes of cereal, but still did not get all six prizes, do you have a right to complain to the manufacturer? If so, how would you justify your complaint?
• Suppose you suspected that one prize was in shorter supply than the others, is there any way you could prove it?
• What other kinds of problems could you model in this way?
• What tools, in addition to dice, would be good for generating random outcomes? Suppose you had to generate random numbers between 1 and 12, how would you do it?

• The Cereal Box Problem: Introduction
• Go on a simulated shopping trip to get the prizes
• Teacher's Notes
• Model the problem in your classroom
• The theoretical probability

Interested in the mathematics of the cereal box problem?
Check out the following article by Jesse "Jay" Wilkins, Wilkins, J. L. M. (1999).
The cereal box problem revisited . School Science and Mathematics, 99(3), 117-123.
Click on the title to download the article in Adobe Acrobat format.

Special thanks to School Science and Mathematics, for allowing us to distrubute the article in this manner.

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