By Larry Lesser (The University of Texas at El Paso) and Dennis Pearl (retired from Penn State)
Information
We will overview and illustrate the student-centric use of AI in creating educational fun items to support learning objectives as well as increase joy in statistics classes. Examples include using AI (e.g., Udio, Suno, etc.) to turn a poem into a song individualized to the student's favorite musical style, as modeled at our USCOTS 2025 workshop [note: see last few slides of (link)]. We will also consider how instructors could use AI to create or guide students in creating (and evaluating) other forms of educational fun such as a poem, cartoon, game, etc. Also, we will share examples of how AI-created fun can add joy to a lecture, using prompts such as "Give me a humorous cartoon to illustrate the process of hypothesis testing," and then critique errors in the cartoon (there are likely to be many) and seek a prompt that eliminates those errors. Since even the same prompt may yield different things for different people, there will be the joy of surprise and discovery to see what will come up on the podium computer! The class can also discuss the educational and entertainment qualities of the resulting item(s), perhaps inspired to create something even better later. The authors have used (and had students create) fun items over the years at their respective research institutions, which include diverse student bodies. For example, The first author has taught 2+ decades at a medium-sized HSI university in the Southwest US and his typical statistical literacy courses had about 35 students, the plurality of whom were Hispanic pre-service teachers; while the second author, now retired, has taught using a fun pedagogy in very large multi-section courses at large public research universities for over 40 years. While we have not yet used AI-based fun in our own classroom teaching, we have the experience of a well-received live AI demonstration for a cross-section of statistics instructors (whose institutions spanned liberal arts colleges, research universities, two-year colleges, and high school) at our workshop at the 2025 USCOTS.
Song mentioned in the poster on the statistical theme "Data = model & bias & random error" created by AI in three different styles.
folk version: https://www.udio.com/songs/oY92X6ikVWwkY3cqKhLPc5
rock version: https://www.udio.com/songs/uBHQxDzZ8DDx7XZmUTnGX8
country version: https://www.udio.com/songs/wMZWHXsnniqnp5X2VTg1gX