Baseball Hall of Fame and Math.

As winter slowly turns to spring, it will be time for baseball to make it’s annual appearance.  It is a sport played in school, on playgrounds, and by professionals.  As baseball is extremely important in this country, there is the National Baseball Hall of Fame one can find lesson plans for all sorts of subjects including Mathematics. 

Although the number of lessons available are limited, they are well designed to cover three levels from third grade up to high school.  For instance, they have a nice unit on baseball statistics with 4 to 5 lessons included.  The lessons do include one requiring either an in person or a virtual visit. It is easy to fill out a request for a virtual visit and I didn't find anything about a cost. it also looks as if it can be done without the actual visit.

Each one, rookie, intermediate, or advanced has students working on using a math skill appropriate for the age group.  Grades three to five learn about batting averages in both fractional and decimal form, and other stats that are kept for basketball players. Grades 6 to 8 focuses more on batting averages, averages and percents, and how the stats are used to show a successful player. The lesson plans for grades 9 to 12 goes into batting averages in even more details, slugging percentage, the use of mean, mode, median while learning to calculate standard deviation, and ends with a long term project where students have their own fantasy baseball league.

The second lesson is on geometry and circling bases.  Unfortunately, they only have two lessons for grades 2 to 5 and 6 to 8 but the second one can easily be used in a high school geometry class as one lesson has students calculate the perimeter and area of a rectangle, the circumference of a circle, and an application of the Pythagorean theorem to the baseball diamond.

The final lesson is on the economics of baseball. The lessons for grades three to five focus on introducing students to the basics of supply and demand and the use of decimals in regard to ticket prices. Students in grades 6 to 8 work on learn how the Industrial revolution helped create a market for professional baseball, ways in which professional teams make money, the amount it costs to be a fan, and the the amount of money baseball stars can make. The lessons designed for high school learn about utility and marginal utility, factors that effect supply and demand, what goes into creating a price index, and what factors set the price of a sports production.

These lessons have everything needed to teach several one hour classes. The virtual visits are designed to reinforce the material students studied in previous lessons but if the visit cannot be arranged, it is possible to still do things with your students. Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear. have a great day.