A cartoon suitable for use in teaching the idea that association does not imply causation. The cartoon is number 552 (March, 2009) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license. A t-shirt with this cartoon is also available for sale at xkcd.com.
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about linear estimates (also references median and bell-curve). The cartoon is number 314 (September, 2007) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about time series plots. The cartoon is number 252 (April, 2007) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about time series plots and changepoints. The cartoon is number 418 (May, 2008) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about bar graphs. The cartoon is number 373 (January, 2008) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon suitable for a course website that makes use of a boxplot to display an outlier and also uses the term "statistically significant" in its punch line. The cartoon is number 539 (February, 2009) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching the difference between how the word random is used in probability compared to some uses in everyday parlance. The cartoon is number 1210 (May, 2013) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license
An activity to gather data on oranges for use in a unit on descriptive statistics. The idea was presented at the 2019 USCOTS meeting by Katherine Frey Froslie and is described in her blog at https://www.statistrikk.no/2019/05/19/oranges-are-the-new-statistics/
Here students measure how long it takes them to peel an orange (an easy to peel variety is recommended for in-class usage), what the orange weighs (possibly with and without the peel), and how many wedges are in the orange. This creates a data set with both discrete (# of wedges) and continuous variables (time to peel, weight, percentage of orange weight in the peel) to be used for description. Other variables can be added through class discussion depending on student interest. An easy to peel variety of oranges
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about scatterplots and correlation. The cartoon is number 388 (Feb, 2008) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon to initiate discussions about how the correlation is a unitless number that does not change with changes in the units of the variables involved. The cartoon was created in February 2020 by British caetoonist John Landers based on an idea by Dennis Pearl (Penn State) and Larry Lesser (Univ of Texas at El Paso). An outline of a lesson plan for the use of the cartoon is given in a 2020 Teaching Statistics article by Dennis Pearl and Larry Lesser.