Teaching Mathematics and Computer Science
Pig often serves as a simple, fun example for teaching probability concepts from the middle school level upwards. For example, the Interactive Mathematics Program uses The Game of Pig as the core example for its Year 1 probability curriculum, and offers a downloadable Pig simulation tool to test simple strategies for long term scoring. Similar curricular materials are available on the NZMaths Statistics Web-site. A more comprehensive list of online Pig teaching resources is also available.
Pig also provides many valuable exercises for teaching Computer Science in areas ranging from introductory courses to advanced machine learning material. See Computer Science Resources for the Game Pig and/or the following journal publication:
- Todd W. Neller, Clifton G.M. Presser, Ingrid Russell, Zdravko Markov. Pedagogical Possibilities for the Dice Game Pig. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 149–161, June 2006.
A guide to computing optimal play for Pig and similar games is freely available as the NSF-sponsored project Solving the Dice Game Pig: an introduction to dynamic programming and value iteration.
Recently, the CS 61A class at Berkeley using Python has decided to use Pig to explore function abstraction.
Read more about this topic: Pig (dice)
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