#HockeyMath

The Regular Season

This year my class was a group that without an exception, was obsessed with hockey.  They all had their favourite teams, their treasured players and wore their jersey or team themed t-shirts with pride.  I didn't have to tune into SportsNet or TSN or check the hockey scores on my phone.  I could not get down the hallway before school started without one of my Students coming up to me to let me know how their team had fared the night before.  I'd hear about the goals, the trades, the fights, sometimes they would even ask me to play snippets of the game in our morning class meeting so they could show a great play from the night before.  During playoffs, the pregame show from the Las Vegas Knights was high on the video request list.  Eat your heart out, Don Cherry, these kids bleed hockey!

The Playoffs

You would think that a grizzled and seasoned classroom veteran, such as myself, might have thought of a way to leverage this shared passion a lot sooner.  But, I am sad to admit, it wasn't until just before the playoffs that the red goal light went off in my head, and I came up with #HockeyMath.  The math folks at TVDSB had done a great job in December of the #12DaysofTweetmath, so I decided to try doing our own daily hockey math activities and tweet them out.  It's not a unique hashtag, and it's not the first time someone ever posted hockey math on Twitter.  But that's what I called it, for lack of any corporate sponsorship or sports marketing teams to help me.  Unfortunately, sometimes we got so absorbed in the activity, we forgot to take pictures and tweet them out.  I think we averaged a tweet about once a week during playoffs.  But we had fun with it every day.

We brainstormed around how much math you can find in hockey, and then we started coming up with hockey math problems to solve.  I have a Special Education class, so sometimes they needed a little or a lot of help with this part.  Another resource I accessed to help out was https://hockeymath.wordpress.com/ . This is a great article about various examples of math and science in hockey - and I used it for some ideas to get going.  Some of them were a bit too advanced for my group - but I found ways to break down or simplify the math in a lot of the ideas to use with my crew.

We were looking for patterns on the ice surface.  We looked at the (very simplified) odds of a team making it to the Stanley Cup Finals.  We measured distances on the ice, calculated the area of the rink and the face-off circles.  We calculated the volume of a puck.  We looked at statistics - broke them down into what they mean and why teams use them.  We looked at ticket sales, how to calculate HST on a ticket price and how and why ticket prices grow in value as you get closer to the ice surface.  We looked at the salaries the top and bottom players make and calculated what they make per game.  We became team managers and compared some player stats to see who we would play and who we would bench.  We filled out playoff brackets (for bragging rights only!...OK...maybe the winner did get a chocolate bar) and with each team that was knocked out, we experienced either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.  One student ended up with a perfect bracket.  Picked every team right, even the Capitals winning the cup.  Aww Shoot!  I just realised - we could have calculated the odds of being able to do that!

Let me tell you, those kids were so engaged in the math.  My heart gave a little "Whoopie" when I heard one Student say to another, "I hate math, but this is hockey, so it's fun."  And it was fun.  I gotta tell ya, those kids gave it 110%.

The Post Season

With the hockey season over, and the Capitals all wearing their new Stanley Cup rings on the golf courses of the world, I've had some time to reflect on a few things I will do differently next season:

- Start sooner.  I don't think I could sustain it every day all season, but maybe I could cut it back to maybe once a week and run it for a longer period. 

- get others involved.  We were sharing the tweets of some of the things we were doing, but getting some other classrooms involved (board-wide, or worldwide thru Twitter) and maybe creating problems for each other to solve via Google Hangout would be a great way to get at those global competencies and make more connections outside of our building
- get a bit more tech into it.  We were using our iPads to look up info, but mostly used our white boards for calculations.  I'm thinking there has to be a way they could document their learning - collaborative doc, slide show...something.  I'll keep working on that.

If you have any ideas or hockey math to share - please post them in the response section.  I'd love to hear them.  In the meantime, I have a tee time to make.  Isn't that how hockey players are supposed to  prepare for the start of the new season in September?

Blogger's Addendum:
This post was featured on VoicEdRadio's "This Week in Ontario Edublogs" on July 11, 2018 - an Episode I was a Guest on as well.  If you want to check out the discussion between Doug Peterson, Stephen Hurley and myself, check out this link.  We did have some technical difficulties - so I apologize in advance for the sound quality.