This little questionnaire will provide you with a) the ordinal value of your name for your sex/year of birth and then generate b) a bunch of other names from various decades that share your name's ordinal. Not the most complex example, but it does demonstrate ordinal data. Me and all the other 4th most popular names for women over the years. Additionally, this data is pulled from Social Security, which opens up the conversation for how we can use archival data for...not super important interactive thingies from Time Magazine? Also, you could pair up this example with other interactive ways of studying baby name data ( predicting a person's age if you know their name , illustrating different kinds of data distributions via baby name popularity trends ) in order to create a themed lesson that would correspond nicely to that first/second chapter of most undergraduate stats textbooks in which you learn about data distribution and different types of data.

Nate Silver and Allison McCann (reporting for Five Thirty Eight, created graphs displaying baby name popularity over time.  The data and graphs can be used to illustrate bimodality, variability, medians, interquartile range, and percentiles. For example, the pattern of popularity for the name Violet illustrates bimodality and illustrates why measures of central tendency are incomplete descriptors of data sets: "Other names have unusual distributions. What if you know a woman — or a girl — named Violet? The median living Violet is 47 years old. However, you’d be mistaken in assuming that a given Violet is middle-aged. Instead, a quarter of Violets are older than 78, while another quarter are younger than 4. Only about 4 percent of Violets are within five years of 47." Relatedly, bimodality (resulting from the current trend of giving classic, old-lady names to baby girls) can result in massive variability for some names... ...versus trendy baby names th...

UPDATE (12/8/23): YOOOOOOOOO if you got to this post, I suggest that you check out this update for a up-to-date link to this tool. Here is the  Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager , which provides illustrations of trends in baby names, using data from the 1880s to the present. It is a good tool for demonstrating why graphs can be more engaging than tables when presenting data. When I use this in class, I compare the NameVoyager data display to more  traditionally presented data from the the Social Security Agency . Additionally, I teach in a computer lab, so my students were able to search for their own names, which makes the example more self relevant. Yup. I am one of many, many Jessicas that are around my age.