Aunofo Vakalahi

Anching Lin
Math 1030
12 December 2016
Skittles Final Project
Introduction
The objective of this project is to pull together the concepts we have studied throughout this
semester to analyze pieces of information. This would include, organizing and analyzing data,
drawing conclusions using confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. What I will do it, take the
data that we have collected from 49 of students who all had their own individual bags of skittles.
What they did is they sorted the bag of candy by colors and counted how many green skittles,
purple skittles, yellow skittles, orange skittles and red skittles they had in their bags.
Using this data I will create different graphs to display the categorical and quantitative data, then
I will find the mean, standard deviation, and 5- number summary.

Organizing and Displaying Categorical Data:(Colors)

Based on my observations of the class data, the graphs do a good job at reflecting the distribution
of skittles candies by color. Both the pie chart and the pareto represent the data of all 49 students
in the class. I added all their results up and put them in charts. Overall, as you can see there are
more red skittles candies all together and green has the least amount of skittles all together. The
overall data collected by the class does agree with my own personal data from a single bag of
skittles candies. On average there is about 61 pieces of candy per bag.
Organizing and Displaying Quantitative Data: the Number of Candies per Bag
Organizing and displaying the quantitative data takes a long time but it is also very interesting.
The data collected from the class shows that each bag of skittles has on average, around the
amount of 61 skittles. Making the frequency histogram showed that quite a few of the students

had 57-65 skittles in a bag. It was rare to have more than 66 or less than 52 skittles. The shape of
the distribution is close to a dumbbell. I was not surprised by this finding because It seems as
though each individual bag of skittles has roughly the same amount. The graphs reflect a good
picture of what I expected. The overall data collected by the class agrees with my own personal
data. I had 61 skittles alone in my bag which fits perfectly with the rest of the results the class
produced.

Reflection
What is the difference between categorical and quantitative data? The way I like to remember it
is, Categorical is referred to as some kind of variable or category. For example, sex, race, age
group, education level, etc. I remember quantitative data as reference to quantities or in other
words, numbers. Something that can be measured and written down with numbers.For example,
heights, weight, shoe size etc. As you can see there is a connection between the two. They both
work together to produce results. Both important aspects of data.
Going back to the graphs that I used. I used a bar graph, a pie chart, box plot, pareto chart,
histogram chart, and a I also used 5-number summary to show distribution used for a box plot
but is not a graph. The best graphs to use for categorical data would include a bar graph and a pie
chart. The reason that I said this is because these specific charts require the category to be
presented. Of course there are other graphs that would work well with categorical data, but these
are just a few. The best graphs that work for quantitative data would include the majority if not
all graphs. A great example would be Histograms which are useful for displaying continuous data
shown in this project. Bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts are also useful for displaying
categorical data because it shows continuous data.

In this project, it required quite a few calculations. Most of which were for quantitative data. I
had to calculate the sum of all data values and then find the mean, median and mode. These
calculations help to show the distribution of the values from the students in the classroom. I also
had to calculate the 5-number summary that includes the minimum, quartile 1, median, quartile
3, and the maximum in order to produce a boxplot. Then I had to calculate the standard deviation
which took the longest amount of time to do. All calculations made were pretty understandable.
They are needed for the graphs and to show the distribution among the data. As for categorical, I
didnt really have to calculate anything other than calculating what I need to find. It was great to
use some of the concepts we learned this semester in one project.