M&M’s candies have successfully been introduced to the statistics classroom to illustrate a
variety of topics, including frequencies and proportions, probability functions (Magel 1998),
sampling distributions (Dyck and Gee 1998), design of experiments (Lin and Sanders 2006), chisquare goodness-of-fit statistics (Magel 1996), and correlation/linear regression (Froelich and
Stephenson 2013). This candy’s popularity with students may stem from its colorful shells, as
well as its propensity to serve as an edible reward at the conclusion of the experiment. The
candies also provide an intuitive basis on which instructors can build, as students tend to have a
reasonable degree of what to expect based on their previous experiences in dealing with seeing
and eating M&M’s.