M&M Statistics
Have you ever wondered why the package of M&Ms you just bought never seems to have enough of your favorite color? Or, why is it that you always seem to get the package of mostly brown M&Ms? What’s going on at the Mars Company? Is the number of the different colors of M&Ms in a package really different from one package to the next, or does the Mars Company do something to insure that each package gets the correct number of each color of M&M?
Here’s some information from the M&M website:
% color Plain Peanut Crispy Minis Peanut Butter Almond
Brown 13% 12% 17% 13% 10% 10%
Yellow 14% 15% 17% 13% 20% 20%
Red 13% 12% 17% 12% 10% 10%
Green 16% 15% 16% 12% 20% 20%
Blue 24% 23% 17% 25% 20% 20%
Orange 20% 23% 16% 25% 20% 20%
In this activity you will use a large bag of M&M’s and check to see if the distribution of each color in your bag matches what the Mars Company states as being the percentages in the bag. You can use any of the listed types of M&M’s, just do not mix the different types.
Procedure:
Formulate a hypothesis about what you think the color distributions will be in your bag of M&M candies. This is a prediction and needs to be done before you conduct your experiment.
Then, randomly draw six M&M’s from the bag and compare the color distribution of these six to the above distribution given. To calculate % of each color you will count the number of that color and divide it by the total number of M&M’s drawn from the bag.
Next draw 12, 24, and finally 36 candies and calculate the percentages of each color.
Place your results into a data table to organize them.
Make a bar graph of the results from the largest sample. The X-axis should be the colors and the Y-axis will be the numbers of each color. You can use Microsoft Excel to do this or Open Office.
When comparing the results from the four different sample sizes 6, 12, 24, and 36 do you notice any differences in the percentages of each color?
To conclude the assignment, discuss how this exercise demonstrates the importance of sample size in science?
Write up the Lab in a word document or a google doc and save it as a “.rtf” or “.docx” file if using Word and place it into the drop box for this assignment. The Lab write up will include the following sections in this order:
Title
Purpose
Hypothesis
Data Table and Bar Graph
Discussion
