The victim rested stiffly on its back in the catapult bucket, eyes staring blankly ahead. The scientist laid out the measuring tape. He signaled to his partner, and the victim was released into the air.

It was just another day in AP Statistics.

Students catapulted gummy bears on Wednesday, Oct. 28.

“The students have been learning about experimental design in class, so now they’re actually applying it,” AP Statistics teacher Laura Sapp said. “They’re using their knowledge of experimental design to actually create and conduct an experiment where they’re testing whether the angle at which a gummy bear is launched affects how far the gummy bear travels.”

The gummy bear lab was worth a test grade.

Students weren’t the only ones whose estimations about the gummy bear experiment were imperfect.

“I way over-predicted how many gummy bears I thought I would need so I let them [the students] consume some of the subjects after they were done,” Sapp said.

As one would expect, students did not pass up the opportunity to eat candy in class.

“Yeah, I ate gummy bears,” Tammie Melton, senior, said. “Mrs. Sapp said they were the cheap kind but they were really good.”

“Justin [Wickham] and I had, like, a contest to see who could catch the most [gummy bears] in our mouths,” Emma Devane, senior, said.

The catapults were constructed on Tuesday, Oct. 27.

“We spent about the last ten, fifteen minutes of class building our catapult,” Devane said. “We filled out our pre-lab stuff about how many different trials we would have and what angles we would shoot the catapult at. We wrote about lurking variables and other stats things too.”

Students enjoyed the lab.

“It was really fun to see how our catapult worked because we built it,” Devane said. “It was fun to see how far they [the gummy bears] would go.”

“It was pretty different than what you would do in the average math class,” senior Nate MacCharles said.