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...
The Southern Poverty Law Center has used mapping software in order to illustrate the location of different hate groups in the US. How to use in class: I think this demonstrates how good old descriptive data collection plays a valuable roll in law enforcement, social justice, etc. I think this demonstrates why well-visualized data may be a more compelling way of sharing information than data in tables. Another way to use this is for your students to create a methods section based upon the data collection information provided on the website: You can make the data more personalized for your class by digging down to state-wide data. In addition to the maps, the website includes various other descriptive data quantifying different hate groups in the US. I used this in class along with other examples of how data can be mixed with maps in order to provide information on regions/states. This could also be used in a Social Psychology class in order to illustrat...