The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis. I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data, courtesy of Redditor fevaah , showing old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't). If this idea was help...
One of my favorite upper-level elective courses to teach is Positive Psychology. I recently came across a comprehensive account of various facets of how positive psychology can be assessed in nations: https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction . Like, the website is just great. Below is an example of the data you can explore, in various formats, animation options, and you can download the data. It is great! From this website, I downloaded and compiled two data sets that capture GDP, Cantrill Ladder Score, and life span data for hella countries. You can perform a variety of significant and non-significant correlations and regressions using this data. Additionally, the countries are divided into six regions, allowing you to conduct some one-way ANOVAs with your students. Here is the data, compiled by my awesome RA, Maddie: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/129NQcPdFwZjyzZAJdX6odKC7KiFk_Q1Lqa-SD4kk5FQ/edit?usp=sharing