Kiss & Tell: High School Stat Squad Uncovers Hershey’s Secrets

Armed with digital scales and calculators, high school students in Statistics class are tackling a sweet question: Are all Hershey’s Kisses created equal?
In their hands-on lab, "Is a Kiss Just a Kiss?", students are unwrapping the numbers to see if Hershey’s lives up to its packaging claims. By weighing individual candies, subtracting wrapper mass, and building histograms, the class is bringing real-world quality control to life.
Students are using statistical metrics to answer key questions:
- Counting & Weight: Calculating mean, median, and range to check if a 200g bag yields too many or too few Kisses.
- Manufacturing Consistency: Plotting histograms and calculating standard deviation to see if candy weights form a smooth bell curve.
When the data was tallied, the results surprised the students: the manufacturing precision was remarkably accurate across the board, with only a single outlier in the entire bunch drifting away from the average weight.
About the MAT 1450 Statistics Class
This high school statistics course swaps dry textbook problems for hands-on experiments, helping students learn data collection, graphing, and quality analysis through everyday items.
📷️ Mr. Collins
