My kids and I like Welch's fruit snacks. We buy them from CostCo, in big boxes with 80 packages.
There are five flavors/colors. We're not entirely sure what the corresponding fruits are supposed to be. The kids proposed:
- blueberry (or grape?) - purple
- peach - yellow
- raspberry - pink
- strawberry - red
- orange - orange
The number of fruit snacks in a package is generally 12 or 13, but we've noticed that the five types are not equally frequent, and it seems like they are not completely random. For example, we prefer the dark purple ones, and they seem to be clustered: that you often get none or a number of them.
We wondered:
- How frequent are the five different flavors?
- Are the flavors in a package completely random?
To address these questions, we gathered some data: we counted the number of snacks of each flavor in each package in one box. (It turned out that there were 81 packages rather than 80 in our box.)
We presented the work at the Glenn Stephens science fair on 2 Feb 2016. At the science fair, kids gathered data on a second box, which contained 83 packages rather than the expected 80.
We added data on a third box in May 2017. These data include two extra
columns: total and person. The latter takes values d, c, a,
or m.
