Classify This! Adventures in Algorithmic Modelling

USCOTS 2025

Session Description

Have you ever found yourself wishing you could introduce ideas from machine learning into your statistics or mathematics classroom but weren’t sure how to do it? If so, this might be the session for you.

Through a set of hands-on activities drawing from a variety of engaging contexts, we will explore a common machine learning algorithm for classification. Drawing on mathematical concepts (e.g., algebra, trigonometry), these activities can help build a foundation for students’ algorithmic thinking. This session will also include a discussion of how and where these activities could be implemented in participants’ statistics or mathematics courses.

Download slides here

Agenda

• Welcome
• Warm Up!
• Introduction to Classification
  • Activity 1: Purple Rain (Taylor’s Version) — The goal of this activity is to introduce students to the idea of similarity, and how we can use numerical attributes to quantify the similarity between two cases.
  • Activity 2: You Belong with Me: Classifying Taylor Swift — The goal of this activity is to introduce quantifying the similarity between two cases when we have two numerical attributes (using Euclidean distance) for the cases.
  • Activity 3: Mathematics of Euclidian Distance — This activity provides the mathematics behind finding the euclidean distance in two dimensions and beyond.
• Classifying Continued
  • Activity 4: Reccommending Movies — The goal of this activity is to introduce quantifying the similarity between two cases when we have categorical attributes for the cases.

Extensions

For more activities and extensions of this work check out our Algorithmic Modeling page!