September 16, 2013

Today is Monday, and the start of a new chapter: Data Analysis/Statistics.  This is a subject that's usually greeted with groans and students running for the hills, but we worked with M&M's, so all was well.  It was a fun graphing activity, full of candy and crayons, and well worth coming to class for.

Mrs. Klassen generously provided us with individual fun-size bags of m&M's for our experimental probability graphing/data analysis lesson.  We all enthusiastically predicted what colors would have the most concentration.  I chose brown since it seems like all you get are the ugly brown M&M's.  Smart chics are so underrated.

After all our predictions were made, we happily opened our bags and began to sort our different colors into piles of like-with-like, and placed them on our graph.

By the way, this is not the actual graph, nor is it the actual M&M's.  Picture a similar graph, and about 19 M&M's altogether instead of the 50 or so you see here.  My actual graph, once converted to a pictograph from a real graph, looks a little bit more like this:

 

All told, we learned a lot about M&M's, and a lot about data analysis.  Out of my 19 M&M's, I had 1 yellow, 2 red, 4 green, 5 blue, 5 orange, and surprisingly, only 2 brown.  The class averaged about the same as mine with 55 yellow, 55 red, 67 green, 78 blue, 97 orange and 78 brown.  This data almost matched the percentages of each color as distributed by the M&M company.