Using spreadsheets to teach probability in French high school

Overview & Synopsis

Including a 'frequentist' point of view has resulted in experimentation becoming an important issue in the teaching of probability in high school. Spreadsheets are now widely used, but the status of the results produced and how to use them are not always clear for the students, since two domains are at play in turn: statistics and probability. Through the French example-but this can also be applied to the teaching of probability in other countries − this paper reviews some questions about spreadsheets, namely simulating random experiments and shifting from discrete to continuous distributions.