M&M Color Distribution

Have you ever wondered which color of M&M occurs most often?  Does the M&M company base their colors off of advertising or is it random?  In my math class, we did a very engaging lesson that turned this question into a learning activity.  This activity is excellent to use with elementary children, and can involve many different learning skills.

My class each received a snack size bag of plain milk chocolate M&M's.  Before we could open the bag, we had to make a prediction.  I guessed the color that would occur the most would be green, because frankly, it is my favorite color!  The color that I thought would occur the least was red.  After our predictions were made, we could open our M&M's (but we could not eat them!).

In my M&M bag, it did not turn out how I thought it would.  This is a picture of my M&M's...

I had more oranges than any other color!  This was way unexpected.  The graph that these M&M's are in is actually called a "Real Graph".  This is a real graph because it uses actual M&M's.  Real graphs can be used in many different activities.  For example, you could do a graph using real shoes!

Each student in our class had different data for their real graph.  So we used Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers and combined our class data.  Our totals for each color were:

Brown: 53

Orange:97

Blue: 78

Green: 67

Red: 55

Yellow: 55

Grand Total: 405

That's a lot of M&M's!!!  We then put these numbers into percent form.  So we took the (total number of a color/Grand total).  We did that for each color listed above.  Here are our percentages...(rounded to the nearest tenth)

Brown: 13.1%

Orange: 24%

Blue: 19.3%

Green: 16.5%

Red: 13.6%

Yellow: 13.6% 

In our class the color that occurred the most was ORANGE.  I would have never guessed!  These answers may differ from experiment to experiment, but they should be around the same percentage.  Because, guess what!  The M&M company actually DOES distribute the color of their M&M's differently between each color.  Check it out Plain Milk Chocolate M&M color distribution.

If you look at the link, my class percentages and the M&M company percentages are pretty much the same!  Except, according to the company, the blue M&M should occur most in M&M bags.

This activity is a great activity that can involve anyone at any age. But make sure to not eat the M&M's until after the activity is over! :)


Source for activity:
Klassen, Rosanne. Class lecture. Mathematics for Elementary Education Teachers II. Mesa Community College, Mesa, AZ.