Translator: Nadia Pshenitsyna Reviewer: Denise RQ
Good afternoon.
I have a couple of questions for you before we get started.
And I think the questions are motivated
to get you to think about our current situation in the United States
in terms of education, innovation, and wealth.
True or false: the United States has more billionaires than anywhere in the world?
(Audience) True. Ricardo Valerdi: That's correct.
True or false: more patent applications had been filed from the United States
than any other country?
( Audience) True. RV: Correct.
Fewer than half of high school graduates in the US are ready for college level math
true or false?
(Audience) True. RV: Correct.
We won't get there. (Laughter)
Fewer than 5% of college degrees awarded in the US are in engineering;
true or false?
(Audience) True. RV: That's correct.
So I hope that you understand just from these four questions
that we actually live in a crisis, but we also live in a time of opportunity.
Let me talk about Arizona in particular.
Arizona ranks 48th in the country in student spending in education,
but we rank 1st in the country of professional baseball games per capita.
(Laughter)
637 games per year, in case anybody is wondering.
It's almost like having a double-header every day of the year.
So think about that.
This presents an opportunity then to use baseball
- which this is the hotbed literally, of baseball -
and use it to leverage our situation or to improve our situation in education.
Now, as an educator and as a baseball fan
I love science, technology, engineering, and math--STEM,
which coincidentally is "Mets" backwards.
(Laughter)
So what I want to talk about to you today are three things.
Number one: math is abstract and that's a bit of a problem for students.
So we'll talk about how to resolve it.
Number two: math is scary for students,
and so, we'll talk about some solutions to that.
And the issue is those two are reinforcing:
it's abstract so it becomes scary,
and it's abstract so it's still scary no matter what grade level you're at,
so we have to break that cycle.
The third thing is we don't have enough opportunities
to provide hands-on learning in schools;
so we'll talk about some solutions for that as well, OK?
let me talk about the first issue which is math being too abstract.
And we can mostly blame the Greeks,
and some French mathematicians, and some Brits as well,
so people like Euler, Laplace, Descartes.
And they are the ones who came up with a lot of these concepts
that we use today and they are very exciting,
they actually help innovation,
but they don't necessarily allow a third-grader to figure out
how to get through the day.
I mean, be honest, when was the last time
the Pythagorean theorem helped you get through the work day?
But it turns out the Pythagorean theorem is a very powerful tool in baseball.
So let's do a little bit of math.
Here is a right triangle.
The distance between home plate and first base is 90 feet.
So if you draw a right triangle, that could be one of the sides.
And we already know the distance, 90.
The distance between the first base and the second base is also 90 feet.
So now we know the distance of the two sides of the triangle,
so we can solve for the third.
You square 90, and you add it to another square of 90,
and you get the distance from home plate to second base.
And if you did it in your head, it's 127 or so. So, good job.
So now we know
how far the catcher needs to throw the ball to get to the second base
in order to throw a runner out that may be stealing from first to second.
See? So that's what can help us make math less abstract;
by applying it to a real situation?
Let me give you another example.
Let's talk about torque.
I could just tell a student: torque equals force times distance.
But that's not going to mean much unless you talk about a teeter-totter.
And in this particular teeter-totter we're balancing two different forces.
On the left side is a 70 pound fourth-grader,
on the right side is a 140 pound mascot.
That's Baxter the Cat for the Diamondbacks.
So how do we balance the two sides if the forces are different?
Well, the rule in torque is you change the distance of the beam,
between the beam and the fulcrum,
the point where the two sides are being balanced.
So you'll notice that they are standing at different distance from the fulcrum,
so that's how the two sides, the two torques are equal to each other.
There's nobody touching the beam, there's somebody there just for safety,
But you can see the student now appreciates what torque is,
because is she didn't, she'd fall over and hit her head.
So our goal is to make the math and the science
so simple that even Yankee fans will understand it.
(Laughter)
I'm wearing a Mets shirt, so you have to understand that.
Let's talk about the angle of trajectory of a home run.
We could just tell the students
that the optimal angle of flight for a sphere is 45 degrees,
but they'll never really remember that, unless we do an experiment,
and they'll also realize that the most of the math you learn
there is an assumption that you are dealing with a sphere.
This is not a sphere, folks. This is a baseball.
And it has seams and stitches, 216 of them to be exact.
I counted them.
So that means that the aerodynamics of a baseball are different than a sphere.
So, the optimal angle trajectory for a home run is not 45 degrees.
What we do is we set up an experiment for students to think about:
"Hey, how do we derive
the actual value of the optimal angle of trajectory for a home run?"
Let's set up an experiment.
Professional baseball field? Check. Baseballs? Check.
Water balloon launchers, check, giant protractors, check.
We are ready to go. Now we are doing science.
So we hold all the variables constant,
that is how much tension or force you are pulling on the ball,
and the only thing that we change is the angle at which the ball is being launched.
And students intuitively know that if you launch something at a straight angle
it's probably going to be a line drive or a ground ball.
And if you launch something at too high of an angle,
that's going to be a pop fly.
So they are trying to find what is the optimal angle of trajectory.
So this is an empirical experiment.
And they learn very quickly that it's not 45 degrees,
it's more like 35 or 30 degrees.
And then you can compare it to real data of home runs.
Because we have all this data available to us.
Baseball truly is a statistician's wet dream,
because all this great data is available.
Most of you have heard of 'Moneyball'.
'Moneyball' is really based on the idea of sabermetrics,
which is using data to try to find inefficiencies in the market.
And I lived in Boston; actually, during the time
when the curse of the Bambino was broken.
So I became a bit of a fan,
and after winning the first World Series in 86 years
you sort of you tend to gravitate towards that emotion.
And what I learned is that Boston in particular
was really a baseball-crazy town.
But then I moved to Arizona and realized
this is really the crazy baseball town, which is great.
So what baseball provides is a laboratory for experimentation,
a laboratory for learning:
physiology, biomechanics, statistics, geometry.
We not only teach them how to play baseball but we also teach them
how to use their math, and science skills, and challenges,
in order to understand the game better.
So let's talk about the third issue
which is not enough opportunities for hands-on learning in the classroom.
What we've done with our "Science in baseball" program
in Arizona, California, Illinois, and even Australia,
is we've created a curriculum for teachers.
They take the lessons, and they take the kit of materials,
everything they need to run these lessons:
baseball cards, water balloon launchers, heart rate monitors,
all the materials they need to make the baseball field the classroom.
We empower these teachers,
and that becomes our point of impact or our leverage point
because for every teacher that we train,
they can directly impact 30 kids, at least 30 kids.
So, so far we trained 200 teachers in Arizona.
Do the math, 200 times 30 is 600 students.
That's just in Arizona.
And we are growing this program worldwide.
Now, the idea is not to stop with baseball, actually.
We also created the "Science of soccer" program,
we are in conversation with some football teams.
Heck, I've even been asked to create the "Science of cricket."
A couple of interesting unintended consequences have come from this.
The first one is that these teachers end up creating their own lessons
which is fantastic, that's what we want to see.
We want to empower these teachers
to really be the deployment mechanism for the program.
The second unintended consequence
is that we found students have taken their interest in sports
and that's translated into other things on their campus,
such as science fair projects.
We've seen the number of the science fair projects increase
in terms of their application to sports.
One particular example, at Wickenburg high school here in Arizona,
was the creation of a baseball bat in woodshop.
There is a lot of math involved in designing a baseball bat
and optimizing the sweet spot, because that's where you want to hit the ball.
That's been a great second order of fact
that has grown from our curriculum and our program.
The second thing we've found interesting, and you'll notice from this photo as well,
is the involvement of girls in the program.
It turns out that even though
the boys outperformed the girls on the baseball field,
the girls outperformed the boys in the classroom.
So it gives them both an opportunity to shine.
And this is great, because then the girls end up teaching the boys all the math,
and then the boys end up helping the girls on the field.
So it's really a nice blend of skills and abilities.
What I want you to think about is
how math and science can help you see the world a little bit differently.
Next time you are at a baseball game, I challenge you to do the following:
don't just think about the peanuts and the Cracker Jacks,
I want you to think about the psychology;
what's going on between the pitcher and the batter?
I want you to think about the physiology:
what's going on in terms of training?
Did that player take performance enhancing drugs?
What's going on in terms of the physics?
Did the actual batter hit it on the sweet spot?
So I challenge you to think about sports
and think about math and science together,
because it makes them both a lot more interesting.
And what I tell students is math and science plus baseball:
exponentially awesome.
Thank you.
(Applause)