Lab: M&M's

M&M's candies are a simple pleasure that most of us have enjoyed over the years. With this lab, the question is raised: Does the mixture of colors in your bag match up with what the factory says it should be?

For many years, the M&M manufacturer posted on their website the exact distribution of colors coming from their factories. About 5-10 years ago they withdrew those figures from the public website, but a persistent researcher convinced them to release the current numbers.

In this lab, each student gets a standard-sized bag of their own (often provided by a handful of generous parents), where they count the number of colors in their group, and eventually compare the numbers as a classroom. Students then compare their percentages with the corporate projections. Eventually they must wrestle with the question of why the classroom figures differ from the national figures -- contemplating the concept of randomness in the midst of their survey.