This is a beautiful story from Reddit, with a very kind Redditor, Higgnenbottoms/Quoc Tran, who shared his data with all of us, so we can use this as an example of a) independent t-tests, b) violin plots, AND R.  So, user r/quoctran98  wanted to know if Daves knew more Daves than non-Daves do. HA! He started by collecting data from r/samplesize .  Do you all know about that subreddit, where you can post a survey and see who responds? You're welcome. Anyway, Quoc analyzed his data AND created a violin plot to illustrate his data. He shared it at r/dataisbeautiful , which is another excellent stats subreddit. See below. AND...here is the kicker...I contacted Quoc, and he shared his data (so your students can run their t-tests) AND his R code . I cleaned up his data a bit to provide the same results as the graph above (he had someone report that they knew 69 Daves. I mean, he collected the data from Reddit users.).

"The answer is always more spreadsheets." -Michael Hobbes The good news: 1) This isn't a COVID example. 2) This is one of those examples that gets your students to think more abstractly about some of the tougher, fundamental questions in statistics. Precisely: How do we count things in the very, very messy real world? What are the ramifications of miscounting messy things? 3) The example comes in the form of the very engaging podcast You're Wrong About , hosted by Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall. @yourewrongabout The bad news: The example is about human trafficking, so not nearly as fluffy as my hotdog or seagull posts. That said, this episode of the You're Wrong About podcast, or even just the first 10 minutes of the episode, reveals how hard it can be to count and operationalize a variable that seems pretty clear cut: The number of children who are trafficked in America every year.  The You're Wrong About podcast takes misunderstood, widely reported event...

Many stats instructors use dice and/or coin flips to teach their students about distributions, probably, CLT. Here is an alternative to physical coins and dice, in case you are teaching from a distance. Certainly, there are countless other websites that will roll a dice or flip a coin for you, but these simple websites created by Google are intuitive and pretty. Using Google's dice rolling simulator, y ou can roll a standard six-sided die. Or a DnD 20 sided die. Or multiple dice.  I included the link, but all you need to do Google "Roll dice" to get to the website. Google also lets you flip a coin.  This simulator doesn't have any fancy options, and you can get to it simply by Googling, "Flip a coin".