Update: Using baby name popularity to illustrate unimodal and bimodal data

I love internet-based teaching ideas. They are free and current. At least they were current when I first posted them, but some of my posts are ten years old.

Such is the case for my old post about the Baby Name Voyager and how to use it to illustrate unimodal, and bimodal distributions.

Instead, please go to NameGrapher to show your students how flash-in-the-plan trendy baby names, like my own, have an unimodal distribution:

As opposed to bimodal distributions, which flag a name as a more classical name that enjoyed a resurgence, like Emma:

When I use this in class, I frame it between names that were trendy once and names that were trendy one hundred years ago and are again trendy. As a mom to grade-school-aged kids, I have certainly noticed this as a trend in kid names. So many Lilies and Noras!

I also make sure my students understand that this information is gathered via Social Security Administration applications from the federal government, to back up another claim I make all semester long: Data is everywhere.

A good follow-up activity for this is asking your students to enter their names into the database and describe the distribution shape.

Hat tip to Greg Jensen for pointing me to the new website.

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