For many, Skittles are simply a candy often correlated with "tasting the rainbow" used to treat yourself.
As a part of Lausanne's International Baccalaureate (IB)a Psychology Year 1 class, the fruity candy is used academically for population sampling.
As Year 1 IB psychology classes are learning about sampling methods, they are using Skittles as participants.
Students are divided into four groups and each given a large size bag of Skittles.
Five sampling methods are then evaluated: random sampling, opportunity sampling, volunteer sampling, systematic sampling and stratified sampling.
"The goal of this exercise is to learn how to calculate and discover which sampling method is most representative of the target population, which sampling method is the least representative of the target population, which sampling method took the longest to complete and why that may be an issue for researchers and why might some sampling methods be problematic in the real world," teacher Dr. Lisa A. Bailey said.
Students are also asked to calculate the mean, median and mode for a particular sampling method.
"Sampling with Skittles is always a fun way to learn sampling techniques. Eating a few of the skittles during the exercise seems to help the students remember the techniques as well!" Dr. Bailey said. "The hands-on nature of the exercise and the relation to something students know (candy) helps them to remember the process. Physically counting the skittles and separating them by color helps them learn the information differently than only reading about it."
Click here to see our Facebook post featuring all the photos of the exercise.