Thursday, April 24, 2008

Take Me Out to the Ballgame!

The other night I went to my first Arizona Diamondback’s game and they beat the San Francisco Giants 5-4. It was a beautiful stadium with a retractable roof and it only took around 4 minutes to open that whole roof over the stadium. The day before we actually took a tour of the stadium (only $6 per person) and it was a fantastic tour. They even have a swimming pool and you buy tickets for the seats and the swimming pool all together! My favorite thing was the garlic fries that were covered with garlic (only cost $5.50). Yummy but smelly (for others, not me!) As I looked around me, I realized all the opportunities to teach math that are available at a baseball game. It was an exciting game and I can see why children are drawn to an event like this so why not use this in the classroom. It is a way to show real life examples for using math and I really believe that is what we need to do in order to be successful with teaching our students. Here are some suggestions and if you have any others, feel free to add them in the comments.

1. Player stats
2. Distances
3. Speed of the pitches
4. Concession stand prices
5. Souvenir prices
6. Ticket prices
7. Game attendance
8. Amount of food sold
9. Ratios
10. Percentages
11. Geometry

3 comments:

diane said...

Pat,

My son taught himself to read using the sports page of our local paper.

He was born in 1980, before home computers gave fans instant access to facts and figures. So each Christmas, we would buy him a World Almanac.

He still remembers all the stats he poured over as a child - and sometimes uses them in his job as sports announcer on a local TV station!

loonyhiker said...

diane: What a great way to encourage reading! And what an omen for his future career. Thank you so much for sharing this.

diane said...

Pat,

The kicker is: even though many internationally-known and respected edubloggers don't have Wikipedia entries, Scott does!
http://tinyurl.com/328em2