Marc Richard

2/1/18

The M&M Lab

Introduction:

Our goal in the M&M Lab was to demonstrate to the class the scientific method. The

scientific method is broken up into six steps: The first to Observe and question. The second to

formulate a hypothesis. Then to develop a test for that hypothesis. Then to test the hypothesis

and gather data. Then it is time to interpret results and then report for peer review. It is already

known well amongst the scientific community that this is the way that research should be

conducted, and our class will reinforce that idea. The class came up with three hypothesizes. The

first was that all bag contained the same number of M&Ms. The second was that there are more

yellow than any other color in the bags, on average. And the third and final hypothesis was that

as the number of blue M&Ms increase, the number of green M&Ms will decrease.

Methods:

All sixteen people in the class got an unopened bag of fun sized M&Ms handed to them,

they then opened the bag and sorted them by color, and counted the amount the bag contained.

After the information was gathered, it was put into an Excel document where each bag’s contents

were displayed and assorted to show how many of each color there where in the bag.
Results:
Amount Per Bag
18
16
14
Number of M&Ms
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16
Bag Number

We discovered, by counting the contents of each bag, that there is not the same amount of

M&Ms in each bag. The class speculated that this was likely part of a machine packaging system

that M&Ms have in place to package their product. The average amount of M&Ms per bag were

sixteen, but the numbers ranged from fourteen to seventeen per bag. This concluded our

investigation of our first hypothesis.

Color Per Bag

60

50

40
Count

30

20

10

0
Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Brown
 In analyzing the distribution of colors, we can now disprove our hypothesis that there are

more yellow than any other color. Both Orange and Blue had a higher count in total.

Ratio of Blue to Green

8
7
6
5
Blue M&Ms

4
3
2
1
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18
-1
Green M&Ms

To test our third and final hypothesis, this graph compares the amount of blue to green

M&Ms. As the trend lines indicate, there is no correlation between how many greens are in the

bag and how many blues there are.

Discussion:

The significance of the data that the class compiled is very low. There were only 16 bags

of M&Ms that were tested and is far too small of a sample size to make a definitive statement on

any of the hypothesizes. There are millions of these candies made everyday and our sample size

is far too small to compare.

Conclusion:

In short, all three of our hypotheses were disproved, but, the class did use the scientific

process just was the goal to do alongside the experiment. And even though all the hypothesizes

failed, the goal of understanding, and demonstrating, the scientific process was still met.