Chernoff Face Activity

I have never done anything like this before, but found this to be a fun activity that you really can do with any age of students. In our class we did a "Chernoff Face" exercise. What this was is your teacher displays slide by slide what each feature of your soon to be face means. So you have this piece of paper and on it you are going to draw a face. On each slide you see the same three shapes (a horizontal oval, a vertical oval or a circle) but on each slide each shape means a different thing and stands for a different feature. So for example on the first slide you need to know what shape to draw your head. The shape you choose depends on your major. I am a math major so as you can see below, I had to have a vertical oval head. On the next slide you had to choose the shape of your eyes based off of where you were from. I was from the lower peninsula so I had to draw horizontal eyes. This continued for four more slides where you had to pick your pupils based on which types of sports you liked, your nose based off of which of the three pets on the slide you prefer, the mouth on the genre of food you prefer (out of the three given) and finally which type of music you liked the best based off of the three types given. Below you can see an example of what my face turned out like. After our faces were drawn we split into three groups based off of which of the three head shapes we had (from slide one). From there we split our groups up even further based off of what feature our group found as the 2nd most important feature on our faces. We did this one more time and then discussed how each group split up and why we each felt those were the 2nd and 3rd most important features on the faces. It was a fun exercise and like I said before can be done with just about any age with the tweeking of questions (features).