The Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education is happy to
announce our 52nd Cartoon Caption Contest – now ongoing every month for over four years!
Each month a cartoon, drawn by British cartoonist John Landers, is posted for you and your
students to suggest statistical captions (cartoons are posted at the beginning of the
month and submissions are due at the end of the month). The caption contest is offered
as a fun way to get your students thinking independently about statistical concepts.
The next cartoon and the entry rules for the contest ending September 30 are at
https://www.causeweb.org/cause/caption-contest/september/2020/submissions&l…
The best captions will be posted on CAUSEweb and the winner(s) will receive their choice
of a coffee mug or t-shirt imprinted with the cartoon and their caption.
Enjoy.
August Results: There were 61 entries for the August caption contest that featured a
cartoon showing a nearly empty auditorium except for three audience members sitting far
apart from each other and wearing masks and four people on stage wearing masks and sitting
in front of computers. There are Olympics rings on the wall behind them. The winning
caption for the August contest was “With the 2020 Olympic athletes sidelined by the
pandemic, the statistical community takes center stage in modeling and vaccine research.”
Written by Jim Alloway of EMSQ Associates. Jim’s caption is a nice way to introduce the
value of statistics in studying the spread of infectious diseases. An honorable mention
goes to Avery Camac, a student at Penn State University for the caption "The audience
was at full capacity because they must stay 6 standard deviations apart!" that can be
used in general discussions about the rarity of values being so far apart in a population
distribution. A second honorable mention goes to an anonymous contributor with the
caption “The Venn Diagram competition in the age of COVID sold about as many tickets as
could be expected” to introduce the use of Venn diagrams in visualizing probabilities.
Thanks to everyone who submitted a caption and congratulations to our winners!