During the first week of school, Bryant Ranch School 5th graders had the opportunity to explore and broaden their knowledge of statistics terms using a favorite sweet treat, Skittles. As the learning objective, students would develop an understanding of mean, median, and mode.
Working in collaborative teams, students classified their allotted candies into groups based on color. Next, they recorded the amount of each color for every student in their group. Groups then worked together and found the mean, median, mode, range, and any outliers for their groups’ Skittle sets.
Once they finished the activity, students were encouraged to seek out other groups’ results and find similarities and differences, and a class discussion was held. Students were excited to make the scientific observation that, although they may have had an outlier in their personal allotment, the class drew the conclusion that the company created an even distribution of colors when packaging Skittles.
The Bryant Ranch students were also excited to “taste” the evidence after eating their lunches! Fun was had by all.
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