Making Heads and Tails of Generation Loss: A Timeless Tale of Folk Randomness

From the novel perspective of folk randomness, we document a journey through history that provides a lens for scrutinising the impact of changes to a well-known probability exercise—one involving a psychic professor undoubtedly identifying the fake sequence—and the implications of this for the learning opportunities it promotes. Evaluating iterations from the last 70 years, there is evidence of simplification that may have drawn this exercise away from its origins to the detriment of the task’s original intentions. Importantly, this paper calls for statistics educators to rediscover the purpose of classroom tasks and retain the value we wish to impart—protecting the value in our statistical activities as they are morphed and mangled by time, translations between fields, educational focus, and underlying purpose.