Chernoff Faces

The Chernoff Face experiment was a very unique exercise. I enjoyed it, and would definitely use something like this in my own classroom. I could tweak it, with different and/or more questions, and possibly end up with a more detailed face. With younger students the questions would have to be more specific so that one student doesn't change his or her drawing to be with a friend, but definitely very do-able in a classroom.

It was cool to see in the end what everyone's face turned out looking like, and then as a class how we decided to split up. After that I don't really understand how it worked, but the groups changed so drastically changed, with only two people in one group, when we switched to the head shape being "Where you are from?". However some people had the same face. Pretty strange. It makes me realize that it must have been really difficult to come up with the original classification system. Linnaean was one smart guy to boil it down to the Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species system that we use today. Might be long, but it works.