Delicious skittle statistics

Kids love lollies! They love to sort them into colours, count and eat them. Skittle statistics is an activity which can be done with a broad range of kids as a way to engage them in statistical literacy.

First up you will need

- a bag of skittles (I gave each child a zip lock bag of 40)

- a piece of paper (I had the questions to find and a template of a graph drawn on grid paper as seen in the image)

- a pencil to write down answers

Method:

Step 1: Students sort out skittles into groups

Step 2: Students count the number of each coloured skittle

Step 3: Students fill out how many of each colour there are and how many altogether.

Step 4: use the skittles to create a graph (yay for hands on maths!)

Step 5: students can make inferences about which group has more, which (if any) have the same, which has less.

Step 6: this could be linked to probability (If the skittles were put in a bag. how many skittles are there?

Step 6: play around with other data graph ie a pie graph.

Step 7: students could enter the data into excel and use this to create different graphs.

Check out this video length with short how to :)

Curriculum Links

1. (ACMSP263) - representing data with objects or drawing

2. ACMSP147) - creating graphs and tables