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've been writing this blog, statistics pedagogy articles, chapters, and a whole statistics textbook for over ten years. I'm at the point where I see silly stuff on the internet, and it automatically translates to a statistics example. Like this recent Tweet from Sheetz about the Pirates/Philly series this weekend. https://x.com/sheetz/status/1923397811778785489 This is an unapologetically Western PA tweet. I will be using it as a chi-square goodness-of-fit example with my Western PA students at Gannon University this Fall. I even created a data file that mimics the findings (Methods: n = 380, Results: p < .001. Conclusion: Sheetz followers on Twitter love some curly fry). If you are a poor, unfortunate soul who has never enjoyed treatz from Sheetz, I feel bad for you. Look up your favorite regional brands on Twitter and translate one of their polls into a chi-square example. Or travel to your nearest Sheetz to experience some damn joy.