Randomization

Randomization means making a choice without any pattern or plan. Imagine you have a bag of different colored candies and you want to pick one to eat. If you just reach in and grab one without looking, that's randomization! You didn't plan ahead which one you were going to pick, and you didn't know what color it would be until you grabbed it.

In science and research, randomization is important for making fair comparisons. Researchers might want to test a new medicine to see if it helps people feel better. But they have to be sure that the medicine is actually causing the improvement, and not just coincidence or something else. So they randomly assign people to take either the real medicine or a placebo (a fake medicine that doesn't do anything).

By randomly assigning people, the researchers can be sure that the groups are similar in all other ways. For example, if they didn't randomize and just let people choose which group they wanted to be in, maybe people who were sicker would choose the real medicine group, and that would make it look like the medicine was more effective than it actually was.

In short, randomization is like picking a candy from a bag without knowing what you'll get. It helps make sure things are fair and that the comparisons being made are valid.