From Houston Public Media:
It’s the bottom of the ninth and the scoreboard says it’s neck and neck. It’s game day at Minute Maid Park, but players on this field don’t have bats and mitts. Instead, kids are gathered at round tables and they’re armed with pencils and scraps of notebook paper. This is no ordinary round of baseball. This is a game of trivia, and it’s a bit more algebraic.
“We were doing like multiplications, divisions, and we were doing a lot of math,” said 11-year-old Nathan Leal.
He’s here with more than 300 other Houston sixth graders.
His buddy Victoria Gonzalez explains.
“We’re actually here for the math stuff, for the United Way Club and for the Astros game,” she said.
This is United Way’s third annual event called “Have a Ball with Math.” It gives students the chance to experience firsthand where baseball and math intersect.
“I want them to understand that geometry lives in another place other than the chalkboard– that it lives here on the baseball field and it lives out in the real world,” said Najah Callander with the United Way of Greater Houston.
Students worked on some of those hands-on applications. They added measurements to build a replica of the baseball park and learned about statistics for batting averages.
