Carcassonne in the Classroom

Summary

Learning about probability can be hard and frustrating for many students. However, learning about probability through examples with board games can make this task more interesting and fun. We present a sequence of increasingly difficult probability problems derived from the popular board game Carcassonne. Each question is appropriate either for a college classroom or for undergraduate research, with topics including basic counting problems, expected value, Bayes's theorem, Markov chains, and Monte Carlo simulation. Some problems have solutions, but other questions are left open for the reader to explore.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mindy Capaldi

Mindy Capaldi ([email protected]) received her Ph.D. in mathematics from North Carolina State University and is now an associate professor of mathematics and statistics at Valparaiso University. Although her dissertation topic was topology, she now studies mathematics education and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Capaldi's nonacademic interests include gardening, knitting, birding, and reading fiction. She would like to thank her coauthor for introducing her to Carcassonne (as well as many other great board games).

Tiffany Kolba

Tiffany Kolba ([email protected]) received her Ph.D. in mathematics from Duke University and is now an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at Valparaiso University. Her research interests are in probability theory, and she especially enjoys probability applications to problems involving board games and twin birth rates.