It is a tale as old as time that math is hard and boring, at least in the middle school realm. Of course, as any middle school math teacher would say, it is my job to make it fun and enjoyable so students want to get involved and are not as intimated by it. While I have tried to do so throughout my student teaching, I was particularly excited about the ongoing project that I developed for my students.
The March Madness basketball tournament just began and I wanted to try and incorporate it into our classroom. Middle school boys are a hard demographic to reach when it comes to enjoying math. Many of them feel as if math is irrelevant to their life (not arguing), so making math both interesting and irrelevant is the key to their participation. We are in the middle of a unit on all things percents, so I thought I would run with that idea to bring March Madness into the classroom.
I had the students find the winning percentage for every single team in the tournament. This involved setting up an algebraic equation with the number of games played and the number of games won during regular season. Once they recorded each team’s winning percentage, they were to fill out a bracket based on those scores – whichever team had a higher winning percentage won. The students then did the same for field goal percentage and free throw percentage. In the end, we were left with three different brackets to vote on.. The students had to vote on which bracket they felt would perform better in the tournament and justify their decision using claim, evidence, and reasoning.
As a class, we have the brackets displayed in the classroom on poster board. They are updated daily with the game results. Additionally, we check the tournament challenge website daily to see the percentage correct thus far in the tournament. At the end of the tournament, the students will be writing another claim, evidence, and reasoning to explain which bracket performed better.
Miss C