Food for Thought: The M&M Spreadsheet Project for Math Students

Description: Students were put into groups and given bags on M&M's. They were given the task of finding how many M&M's there were of each of the five colors of the candy in the bag. The teacher had them record the information and taught them how to use a spread sheet to find averages of the number of a certain color per bag of M&M's. He taught them how to use the sum and average functions in Excel. He also taught them how to use the chart wizard to create a bar graph of the information that they entered into the spreadsheet. They then printed the graphs that they created. The instructor teaches the students the importance of representing the data accurately and drawing accurate conclusions about the data from the graphical representation of the data. The students learn that the data collected is more accurate when more samples of data are analyzed. A guest comes into the classroom to teach the students to question the conclusions that they make to make sure that their conclusions are plausible and accurate.
How I would modify this lessons to adapt it to my classroom: Since I would use this in my math classroom I would not need to do much editing to make this work for a certain grade level. I would like to use a presentation similar to this in teaching students about percents and how to figure them using a cross multiplication system. The students would do the same thing that the instructor in the video had his students do, but I would add on a percent section to the project in which the students would have to figure out what percent of the total amount of M&M's were of a certain color. The students would then use Excel to make a pie graph with all the colors represented with the respective percents according to the color of the M&M. I would have the groups of students find the average percent for each color of M&M and make a class pie graph that represented the average for the class.
I really liked the way that the instructor put the project together and I would really like to do something similar to this in my classroom one day and make it a little more complicated for a higher grade level.