Graphs - M & M's Yum!

April 10th, 2019

So your sitting in class and your teacher hands you a bag of M&M's, tells you NOT to eat them and it's lunch time!
Today we used graphs to display data and to explore the relationships among the data and today it happened to be All about the M&M's!  We would be collecting individual data about our bag of M&M's then combining our individual data's with the class as a whole to see if we could find the relationship between what colors of M&M's happen more often?  Is there a set color or amount to the M&M's in our candy bags?

So my individual bag had 4 brown, 2 blue, 3 yellow, 0 red, 2 green, 2 orange.
Our Class data of 20 people in class was 33 yellow, 51 brown, 60 blue, 62 green, 55 orange and 48 red, a total of 309 M&M's.

Statistical data is often displayed graphically, we did just that today and by presenting the data as a set of numbers it made it easier to study the relationships in the data.
Here are a couple of pictures I took during our activity in class.  We took our grouped data and put it into a pictograph.  We had the color of M&M's and each M&M on the graph represented 10 M&M's,  We also made a bar graph and each bar represented the number of M&M's we got in each color.  We had 16% Brown, 18% Orange, 19% blue, 20% green, 16% red, and 11% yellow.

Grouped Data

Pictograph and Bar Graph with Grouped Data

Dot plots of Grouped Data 

After completing all the grouped data we constructed a strip of paper, divided it into parts that represented the colors and amounts of m&m's per color and their percentages, we then connected the 2 ends of the strip of paper making a circle.  We were then able to lay out circle out on a piece of paper and mark out the "parts" of the whole circle, the parts being each color.  We drew a big circle on the paper and colored in the parts of the whole til we made a pie chart or you could call it a circle graph.  I loved the idea of making the circle, it allowed us to see the relation of data to the graph and also the parts to the whole as we constructed it.  Here is our Example:

Circle Graph / Pie Chart

After coloring our Pictographs we were allowed to eat our M&M's because they were now be represented by colored dots on our paper rather than the actual M&M.  This was a fun activity!  This is something you could easily do with several different grade levels, the hardest part is getting them not to eat the candy!
Do Not Feed the Animals!
Terri

This video is an example of what we did we our M&M's.  The graph construction is not the same but would be a variation.  I like the way we did it making the tape diagram/fraction strips, either way would work but gives more ideas to what we have available to us to use.

By: Mcdoyal