Hershey's Kisses: An Intro to Confidence Intervals for Proportions

As usual, I am revamping my AP Statistics course and upping my pedagogical game. It was time, College Board just gave me the boost I needed.

To be honest, I have had this activity for years but never tried it. I used the "Thumb Tack" version- mainly to save money and I tend to forget to go to the store for school in my downtime. But Kisses aren't too much and I actually have a small class this semester... plus I've had the past 5 days off work!

I have combined two similar versions of this activity into one. Feel free to check out my concoction by clicking here. The first version was sent to me by some friends in a PLN that I have met throughout the the years of going to the AP Reading. There was a footnote on the bottom and I'll give credit where it's due: "Modified by Lisa Brock & Carol Sikes from Aaron Rendahl’s STAT 4102 activities from University of Minnesota".

The second version was found on StatsMedic.

The gist is giving students 5 Kisses and have them guess p, the true proportion of Hershey's Kisses that would land on its flat base. Each student tossed the Kisses for a total of 50 trials (10 tosses with the 5 candies) and calculated p-hat. I then talked them through calculating the margin of error and voila! we had us some confidence intervals! The students plotted their intervals on the board, and with the help of a yard stick, we chose the best estimate for p. Luckily one student's interval was not touched by our estimate, this make a great discussion point.

Kisses,
~ssb
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