M&Ms Task

Grade 11s are learning about exponential growth and decay, and to get us started we did a task with M&Ms.

With each pour, they removed the m&ms with the m side up. The number of m&ms that remained got smaller and smaller until all that were left was the ones with no “m” at all.

Groups made graphs, and we looked at features of the graph, then tried to make an equation. We used our reasoning skills about how we were losing half each time, so we’d be multiplying repeatedly by (1/2), which led to the creation of an exponential equation. We noticed that in our situation there was a horizontal asymptote that was not 0, there were a few m-less m&ms. We played around with transformations to see if we could fit the data better.

Finally we did a desmos regression to see how the program would do it. Using the the exponential regression that’s built in forces the asymptote to be at y=0.

It was a fun task. Looking forward to doing more exploration tasks as we move forward.