Project SMILES developed and assessed an online innovation in learning where students create a song by filling in key words associated with a statistics learning objective. These interactive songs challenge students to make conceptual connections and construct examples or context, thereby fostering statistical literacy and reasoning skills. By reducing statistics anxiety (a key impediment to student success) and enhancing student learning, the potential impact is striking. Interactive songs are a novel learning resource that holds great potential for teaching literacy and reasoning skills in statistics and other STEM disciplines. The web-based, machine-run, and auto-graded characteristic of this resource provides easy access to students anywhere anytime, and addresses instructor hesitations about in-class use.

For instructors, interactive songs are readily adaptable, regardless of pedagogy (e.g., easily incorporated in an online, flipped, or lecture/lab course), and provide a dynamic bridge for groups like two-year college adjuncts who seek more engagement with the statistics education reform movement.

Most importantly, for students, these professional-quality interactive songs are designed to engage, lessen anxiety, and foster active learning that enhances statistical reasoning skills. For enhanced value, a distinctive artist/scientist collaborative created original musical resources of high artistic and educational quality. Our fall 2019 JSE paper details our process (and has analysis of log file data). Also, see our archived presentations at eCOTS 2018, VOICES 2018, USCOTS 2019, and eCOTS 2020.

Project SMILES was supported (Sept. 2015 - Aug. 2020) by NSF DUE EAGER grants #1544426 (PSU), 1544237 (UTEP), and 1544243 (GSU). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

post-grant updates:  We held additional VOICES conferences in 2021, 2022 and 2024, and the video on the SMILES  homepage won runner-up in the Film category of the 2022 STEM Art and Film Festival competition at the International Forum on Research Excellence hosted by the Scientific Research Honor Society Sigma Xi. And for the SMILES song "Central Limit Theorem", we created a proof-of-concept of how the choose-your-own-adventure style could yield different song videos where each of 3 song videos has a different real-life context. If your only hesitation is the genre or singing style, just take the lyrics and paste them into an AI music generator such as Udio, Suno, etc., as discussed in our eCOTS 2026 poster, and there are also plenty of AI song video generators that can turn a song into a music video!  (A tip: for genres where lyrics are harder to hear amidst a busy/noisy arrangement, make sure lyrics are visible as students listen to the song.)