March Madness is the big 68 team college basketball tournament that takes over our TV viewing during the weekends of March. School and office friends are filling out brackets. Engage your students in percents as they get excited about March Madness. Is getting a higher seed really an advantage? Use 30 years of data to help determine for which seeds it makes sense to pick an upset. Finally, students determine a general strategy for picking games in the first round.
The perfect bracket
March Madness Men's and Women's Brackets
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Sunday, March 17th, is Selection Sunday for the Men's March Madness Tournament. Monday night, March 18th is the selection night for the Women's March Madness Tournament. The March Madness bracket predictions can begin.
What are your chances of picking every game? How does the change from 64 to 65 to now, 68 teams in the field complicate things? How many brackets would you need to fill out to pick every possibility? How many reams of paper would you need to print all of those brackets? Let’s do the math! Also, check out the video below that explores your odds of picking all games in the tournament perfectly.
April just had a new baby!
Saturday, March 16, 2019. April went into labor at about 11:00am and birthed a new baby giraffe at about 12 noon.
Here are two past Giraffe baby activities for today!
Huge Key Lime pie
More for π Day!
On a cold and snowy day in Boston, two chefs created a huge Key Lime pie to remind the frozen people of the Northeast how tasty and warm the Keys of Florida are.
After you show this movie to your students, ask them what they wonder about this huge pie and what they would like to figure out.
Supposedly the huge pie served 1,000 commuters but our figuring suggests something else. This is a Yummy activity about multiples, proportions, volume, reasoning and π.
How hard is it to find a 4-leaf clover? + more Saint Patrick’s Day activities
Shamrocks in Ireland are actually be 3-leafed white clover, trifolium repens. If you are lucky, you can sometimes find a four-leafed clover. How rare is finding a 4-leafed clover? How hard do you have to look? What size area of clover must you examine to find one?
Get ready for Pi Day!
Pi Second = March 14 @ 1:59:26
8 possible activities!
Celebrate π in your school and in your math class with activities that demonstrate how π was derived; visually show why π makes sense; show a surprising place where π is used; increase students ability to measure and long divide; applauds the talent of people who can memorize large strings of numbers; and lets students just have fun.
PiDay-ClassOpener - Puzzle to ponder with a surprising outcome.
For members: PiDayClassOpenerSolution.pdf