Math 1040 Section 012

Fall 2016
Mamun Rashad
Skittles Term Project
Daniela Quiza
Jacqueline Hansen
Kristopher Hansen
Roberto Cardenas
Irina Reymer

This Skittles Project represents a sample of college students in the Math

1040-012, Introduction to Statistics class at Salt Lake Community College. All of the
students in the class purchased one 2.17- ounce bag of Skittles at different locations

Skittles Project Fall 2016

Math 1040-012 Mamun Rashad
and at different times. The population is all of the students who purchased a 2.17ounce bag of Skittles because everyone was chosen to participate in the sample.
In this project, we compiled the data of the colors and amounts of Skittles in
each bag that the student bought. The cumulative number of Skittles came out to
1470. The colors represent categorical data, which corresponds to quantitative data,
or the number of Skittles in each color. The entire data consists of Yellow (257),
Purple (310), Red (319), Green (298) and Orange (286). I have created a pie chart,
Pareto chart, histogram, and boxplot for visual representation of the data. I have
calculated the mean, standard deviation and five number summary.

Skittles Project Fall 2016

Math 1040-012 Mamun Rashad

The categorical data in the pie chart and bar graph above show the number
of candies of each color that were in the Skittles bags for the entire class sample.
Below Ive compared the classs overall data to my own. The data from my bag of
candy seems to differ greatly from the class average. I thought mine would be
closer to the class numbers. Below are the results from my bag of Skittles and the
results from the classs sample.
My Skittles
Number of Red
Candies
11
Relative
Frequency of
Red Candies
18.033

Number of
Orange Candies
8
Relative
Frequency of
Orange Candies
13.115

Number of
Yellow Candies
16
Relative
Frequency of
Yellow Candies
26.230

Number of
Green Candies

Number of
Purple Candies

19

Relative
Frequency of
Green Candies

Relative
Frequency of
Purple Candies

31.148

11.475

Classs Skittles
Number of Red
Candies
319
Relative
Frequency of

Number of
Orange Candies
286
Relative
Frequency of

Number of
Yellow Candies
257
Relative
Frequency of

Number of
Green Candies

Number of
Purple Candies

298

310

Relative
Frequency of

Relative
Frequency of

Skittles Project Fall 2016

Math 1040-012 Mamun Rashad
Red Candies

Orange Candies

21.701

Yellow Candies

19.456

Green Candies

Purple Candies

20.272

21.089

17.483

Summary Statistics for (n) sample size of 24 bags of Skittles

Number
of
Candies

Mea
n

Standard Median
deviatio
n

Range

Min

Max

Q1

Q3

61.3

7.94

46

50

96

59

62

61

After finding the summary statistics, the graphs reflect what I expected to
see. In the above histogram and box plot, we see that most of the bags have

Skittles Project Fall 2016

Math 1040-012 Mamun Rashad
between 50-70 Skittles, with one bag having 96 Skittles. Youll see there are no
candies between the values of 70 and 90. The outlier of 96 skews our graph to the
right. The data from the classs number of candy colors differs from mine. The total
of 61 candies in my bag ends up being very close to the mean of the classs candies
per bag.
Quantitative and categorical data are different from one another. Quantitative
data serves a numerical purpose, math can be performed using the data and the
results are meaningful. An example of quantitative data would be how many Skittles
in a bag, or how many eggs are in a carton. Categorical, or qualitative data, is best
used for things that can be categorized by a quality or characteristic. An example of
categorical data would be types of cars, or the colors of our Skittles. Car type or
color is not possible to quantify, any math performed would be meaningless. The
values cannot be compared or ranked, by that we mean the data, such as color, can
be observed but not measured. When graphing quantitative data it works best to
use a boxplot, histogram, or stem-and-leaf plot. Pie charts and bar graphs work well
for qualitative data because they divide the data into different categories and
document the observations.