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65th Annual Meeting of the German Association for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS), Meeting of the Central European Network (CEN: German Region, Austro-Swiss Region and Polish Region) of the International Biometric Society (IBS)

06.09. - 09.09.2020, Berlin (online conference)

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Statistical humor in class: jokes and cartoons for significant fun with relevant effect

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  • Annette Aigner - Institute of Biometry and Clinical Epidemiology, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie. 65th Annual Meeting of the German Association for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS), Meeting of the Central European Network (CEN: German Region, Austro-Swiss Region and Polish Region) of the International Biometric Society (IBS). Berlin, 06.-09.09.2020. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2021. DocAbstr. 462

doi: 10.3205/20gmds335, urn:nbn:de:0183-20gmds3357

Published: February 26, 2021

© 2021 Aigner.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. See license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Outline

Text

Q: Have you heard the latest statistics joke? A: Probably

Such and similar, short or long jokes, but also cartoons and other humorous resources not only cheer up statisticians, but also create an easy, positive access for students to a subject like statistics, which is generally considered difficult.

This article aims to highlight the relevance and positive effects of humor in teaching in general, but especially of easy-to-use materials such as jokes and cartoons. It gives hints and suggestions on how to use them correctly, but of course there are no limits to their implementation in class. In addition, the article contains a collection of freely available online resources that can be used immediately in statistics lessons and in which anyone can find materials suitable for the concrete teaching situation. As an example application, materials for use in an introductory course unit on linear regression are shown and the author's personal experiences are briefly summarized.

We as statisticians of course know that statistics is fun – now we should communicate this to students as well, why not use jokes and cartoons?

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.