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...
I think that interactive visualizations are better than lengthy, wordy text books when it comes to illustrating statistical principles. One little GIF or interactive website can do a far better job than text or words. For example: Everything that Kristoffer Magnusson has given us (effect sizes, correlations, etc.). Here is a new tool for explaining critical regions in Intro Stats. Matthew McBee created an interactive in shinyapps that shows how critical regions change a) depending on test, b) sample size, change of the shape of the distribution. With the ol' t-test, you can show how the critical values move around with degrees of freedom What your t-test critical values looks like at df = 3... ...versus how the those critical values look at df = 80 Also, you can do the same thing but with F curves. Andplusalso: Matt has also created shiny apps to adjust p-values for multiple comparisons , AND another one for calculating p-values based on a test statistics ...