Visit from a Quality Engineer (M & Ms)

We had a mum in our class today who is both an engineer and a scientist.
Norahella works as a Quality Engineer in Medtronic.

She helped us understand what it really means to be a scientist.

The most important words for scientists are WHY?  HOW? and WHAT?

Norahella helped us to work scientifically...

How? ......  with M & Ms!

First of all we had to ask some scientific questions about the bag of M & Ms.

We wondered how many M & Ms are in a bag and whether each bag contains the same number of each colour?

Next we had to form a hypothesis (a guess).

We had to guess how many M & Ms are in a bag?

Some of us had a guess, then we were told the correct answer.

Next we had to guess which colour had the most number M & Ms and which colour had the least number.

Again we heard the correct answer.

Lastly we were given some very interesting (and delicious) homework:

We were each given a mini bag of M & Ms and we have to count how many of each colour there are, and how many M & Ms there are altogether.

Norahella will collect all this data and present it back to us scientifically.

We can't wait.

Of course, now we ALL want to have a job that uses Science and Maths every day!

Norahella came back to us with the results of the M  & M challenge....most reds, least greens, 422 sweets consumed!  Lots of scientific questions!

We also watched the way the colours ran from the sweets.

The colours were absorbed by the water at different rates.