In today’s lesson we introduced some basic statistics for analyzing data- including the mean, median and mode. We showed students how to go about calculating the mean or average of a data set. We defined the median and mode and showed students how to order their data to obtain the median (number in the middle of their values) and demonstrated that the mode is simply the most commonly occurring value. We also introduced different representations of data including number lines and box and whisker plots.
For the activity today, students were assigned to test whether or not on average, there are more yellow plain m&ms in a package of 100, or if there are more yellow peanut m&ms in a package of 50. Each student was in charge of counting the number of yellow peanut and plain m&ms (represented by beads) to determine how many there were in each package. Students’ data was then tallied for the whole class to find the average number of yellow peanut and plain m&ms in each package. As a class we calculated the percentage of yellow m&ms in each package and found that there are more yellow peanut m&ms per package on average.
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