Math Lesson: Fantasy Football

My latest contribution to the New York Times Learning Network is a Math Lesson designed around a simple Fantasy Football-style game.

https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/put-me-in-coach-getting-in-the-quantitative-game-with-fantasy-football/

In this lesson, students use data, statistics, and a novel matchup metric to evaluate players and choose their teams.

As the results come in every week, students can refine their strategies and try to make more accurate projections!

Polygonal Oddities

This is a crazy collection and categorization of mathematical oddities.

http://www.recmath.org/PolyCur/p6odd/index.html

Here, the word oddity has a specific, technical mathematical meaning:  an oddity is a figure with at least one line of symmetry that is made up of an odd number of copies of some polygon.

I’ve never heard of oddities before, and I learned a lot of new vocabulary words while exploring this page:  polyform, hexapent, and quinquerotary, to name a few!

Collection of Science Demonstrations

This is an amazing resource:   a collection of science demonstrations from Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstration Services.

https://sciencedemonstrations.fas.harvard.edu/catalog

There are hundreds of demonstrations in the archive.  Each entry includes an in-depth description of the scientific principle(s) on display in the demonstration, as well as detailed instructions on how to execute the demo.

Topics include Newtonian Mechanics, Light and Optics, and Thermal Physics.  There is also a collection of mathematical demonstrations, as well as a small set of videos.

And be sure to check out their Facebook page here:  http://www.facebook.com/NatSciDemos

Problem of the Week Archive

This is a great resource:  an archive of Problems of the Week from MathCounts.org.

https://mathcounts.org/Page.aspx?pid=1573

MathCounts is a national math enrichment organization that, among other endeavors, runs a middle school math competition every year.  Their “Problem of the Week” is typically aimed at middle school students, but these problems may also be of interest to high school students and teachers.

There are over 10 years of math problems in the above archive.  The problems range in scope from basic “Math Team” style questions to thematic questions based on current events, dates, and holidays.

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