Ample literature has gone into what teachers should do on the first day of class. Should they do an ice-breaker? Dive right into notes? Review a few example questions to motivate the course?

I don’t really have control groups to use as a comparison, but I think these two activities were helpful and engaging, and I figured it was worth passing along.

Introduction to Statistics (Intro level, undergrad)

I stole this one from Gelman and Glickman‘s “Demonstrations for Introductory Probabiity and Statistics.”

When the students come in, I split the course (appx 25 students) into eight groups. Each group was given a sheet of paper with a picture on it, and the groups were tasked with identifying the age of the subject in question. I had some fun coming up with the pictures – I went back to the 90’s with T-boz from TLC and Javy Lopez of the Atlanta Braves…