Thomas McIntyre (pictured on left) watched a video on statistics in his spare time and decided to do some field testing in the school to verify the findings of the video. The premise is below;

“In the jelly-bean guessing game, participants either guess too high or too low and in roughly equal proportion and to about the same degree of inaccuracy. The individual will usually guess incorrectly, however if a large enough group is sampled and their average guess is taken, the average guess approaches the actual number of beans, even if everybody in the sample group has guessed incorrectly.”

Thomas wanted to test this theory, so he took a jar of M&M’s to the quad during lunch with a few tables and an assistant and surveyed around 100 participants to guess the number of M&M’s in the jar. The jury is still out on whether the theory holds true, but I think the fact that he has gone to all this effort, independently and without prompting, to verify the reliability of a theory on statistics which he read about in his spare time is a great testament to his ambition and promise as a scientist/mathematician.

Ben Lyons (pictured on right) helped Thomas out on the day processing data.

Kaleb Withers

Teacher – Science