Lesson and Objectives
Students will be presented with a 2.17 ounce bag of Skittles.  They will open, sort, and count the contents.  Next, they will use the Internet to go to the Skittle's website.  At the website there is information that tells the students what the distribution of each color is supposed to be.  The question students will investigate is whether or not the distribution is true.  Once they have done so they will go to Excel.   The objective is to create a table to enter the actual and the predicted amount of Skittles inside their bag.  There they will make a comparison and decide if the amount is equal to the prediction, higher, or lower.  Once this has been done, they will make a bar graph to compare the actual and predicted amounts. 
Think Sheet
Question 1
What did you learn about distribution in this activity?
Question 2
How do your results compare with what Mars claims about the contents of each package of Skittles?
Question 3
How would you know if the results are the same as the rest of your classmates?  What could you do to find out?
Question 4
How else could you use Excel in an experiment?  Can you think of any examples?
Question 5
How could you let Mars know about your study of the color distribution in a bag of Skittles?
Question 6
Who might be inteterested in this data and why?