Introductory Mathematics and Statistics through Sports Supplementary Activities and Writing Projects

Sport is a wildly popular and accessible pastime that most students find interest in. The link between mathematics and sports - particularly between statistics and sports - is well known, but is rarely used as a method for sparking a real interest and better understanding of mathematics at university level. Introductory Mathematics and Statistics through Sports develops this connection, and uses sport as a tool to help students get to grips with mathematics and statistics. It contains valuable resources, such as activities and writing projects for use in quantitative reasoning or introductory statistics classrooms. These inquiry-based activities and open-ended writing projects are all set in the authentic framework of a sporting environment and are designed to promote critical thinking and mathematical application skills that students can apply outside of the classroom. All activities and projects have been classroom-tested and are ready to be implemented as they are, or can be easily personalized by instructors with a helpful run-down of successes and misunderstandings for each project. Introductory Mathematics and Statistics through Sports places great emphasis on the communication, application, and internalization of mathematics for students whose primary interests are not necessarily in STEM fields.

Tricia Muldoon Brown is an Associate Professor at Georgia Southern University. Her research interests include studying the connections between commutative algebra, combinatorics, and simplicial topology, enumerative combinatorics, and recreational mathematics. With her collaborators, she has published pure mathematics articles in numerous journals, and is actively involved in her teaching. She was a 2009 Project NExT fellow, a 2015 Georgia Governor's Teaching Fellow, and was awarded a 2016 Affordable Learning Georgia Textbook Transformation Grant to adapt an open-source introductory mathematics textbook on her campus. Eric joined the faculty at Bloomsburg University in 2009 as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics and earned tenure and promotion to Associate Professor in the spring of 2014. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Kenyon College in 2004 and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the University of Kentucky in 2006 and 2009 respectively. He is an active member of the Mathematical Association of America, was a Project NExT fellow in the 2009 cohort, was elected to serve a two-year term starting in 2017 as Program Coordinator for the SIGMAA on Inquiry Based Learning, and has co-coordinated or coordinated the student paper competition of his local MAA section, EPaDel since 2010.