Intro to Confidence Intervals- Hershey's Kisses

I know that I was not the creator of this activity, and I have no idea who is... but it was a great way to introduce confidence intervals for proportions. In the past, I have used the thumbtack opener, but SAM's club was calling my name for a ginormous bag of Kisses!

This activity encompasses all of the introductory notes for this lesson; therefore I just jumped right in and skipped the note-taking. We collect a large sample of trials, check conditions, use prior knowledge of sampling distributions, discuss population vs. sample and parameter vs. statistic, etc.

The new stuff is also embedded into this activity. Students are introduced to the phrases: margin of error, point estimate, and confidence interval (duh).

The gist: students are given 5 Kisses, a cup and the student sheet (see below). They are to shake the cup and drop the Kisses on their desk, count how many land flat on the base and repeat for a total of 10 drops and 50 combined Kisses. We create an interval for each student and draw our intervals on the board. From here, we can decide the true proportion of Kisses that would land flat on the base by discussing the overlapping of the intervals.

Is this perfect? Not exactly. What if someone's Kisses were misshapen and that impacted their proportion? I think we can ignore those sort of arguments because my students enjoyed this activity and the statistical point was received.

It was fun and I will definitely do it again next year!

Student Sheet

~ssb

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