Using Sports To Help Teach Math.

There are always several students in your class who live and breathe sports.  They can tell you which player has the best stats, which teams are heading for the finals, or which number is the most awesome.  In most cases, the two sports one hears about most often are basketball or football.  

Fortunately for most math teachers, there are some cool ways one can incorporate sports into the class.  It may happen on a day where students are being released early, or things happened so your planned lesson has to be tossed out the window.  One can also plan certain activities to accompany certain topics taught in the actual math class. 

Using videos showing some field and track events, or setting up your own, one can have students carefully find the time of various runners for 100m, 200m, or 400m events using stopwatches. The resulting data can be used to compare how each runner finished.  For instance, figure out how much faster the runner in first place was compared to the one in second place.  Then have students calculate a runners velocity by dividing the distance they ran by the time it took them. (V=d/t).  If students calculate the runners velocity for each event, they can see if the runner uses the same velocity for each event or if it changes.

Another possibility is to have students choose a sport such as basketball, cricket, or baseball.  Students can go online to find statistics for the chosen sport. Students can look for things like the average height of basketball players on the teams who won the most championships, or build a fantasy football team by selecting players and explaining why they chose each one based on statistics.  There are so many possibilities with finding ways to use statistics.

Speaking of sports, one can find activities that look at sports stadiums.  One can explore how much electricity is used to run it for an event, how much food and drink must be purchased to supply those who attend games at the stadium, what does it cost to hire ticket takers, the refs for a game, and other costs of having games.  One can also figure out how much tickets should cost and the total one might get if every seat in the stadium was sold, half the seats, etc.  Take this a step further to determine how much the stadium must bring in via ticket sales to cover the cost of a game.  Many of these numbers can be found on the internet.

In fact, when having students look for stats associated with their favorite sports, it doesn't hurt to go over the basic stats or the more advance stats.  The Teaching Channel has some really nice idea for these. I don't know about sports so I'd have to use this article to help me.  In fact, just a short trip to the internet will net you with some really cool ideas to use in your classroom.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.