A Coin-Flipping Exercise to Introduce the P-Value

The p-value can be introduced with a coin flipping exercise. The instructor flips a coin ten times and has a student call each flip. The students record their thoughts after each flip. The instructor reports that the caller calls every flip correctly. In this exercise students intuitively reject a null hypothesis because the p-value is too small. Students are reassured to learn from this concrete example that they intuitively followed the logic of statistical inference before they studied statistics.