Fred Bowen's "The Score" column,
Friday, March 9, 2007, Washington Post

Playing the Math Game

How would you like a class in school where you start by watching highlights from ESPN's "SportsCenter," then talk about a book on baseball and wind up by trying to figure out who will win the NCAA men's basketball tournament?

That's what the students in David Stein's Guided Research Seminar in Sports Statistics were doing when I visited Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring last week.

Stein's course, which uses sports to teach advanced statistics, was suggested by his students. He started teaching it last spring, and nine students enrolled. This year there are 32, including six girls, packing the classroom.

Most are in their third or fourth year of Blair's math and science magnet program, so these kids are not simply adding up numbers. They work on complicated projects that look at sports statistics to determine, for example, if a player who sinks five baskets in a row is on a "hot" streak or just lucky. Another project is to figure out which statistics, such as batting average or a pitcher's earned run average, are best for predicting whether a team will have a winning season.

This week the students split into four teams to develop computer models to predict the outcome of the men's NCAA basketball tournament. They will compare their models with predictions by Blair students who are not in Stein's class. Last year, his students' model did much better than the other kids' predictions.

The day I visited, Stein's students talked about multiplicities, reciprocal square roots and "T tests" so much that it made my head spin. But Stein thinks kids of any age can master math by using sports statistics.

"The key to learning math is to surround yourself with numbers until you feel comfortable with them," he said. "And sports are full of numbers."

Stein, who has been teaching math for 15 years, suggests that grade-school teachers and students use baseball box scores to introduce ratios, decimals and averages.

"They can take their favorite three Nationals players and check the box scores every day for their at-bats and hits," he said. "Then they can plot the results on a graph."

Stein says that even kids who don't like sports enjoy his sports statistics class.

"I had one student last year who didn't know what an at-bat in baseball was," he recalled. "So she and I picked a fantasy baseball team together." (That's another class project -- picking a fantasy baseball team.) "By the end of the year, she was arguing with me about our players, just like a real fan."

Stein breaks into a big smile at the memory: "It was a great teaching moment."