Selecting Sports Team Tasks

Overview: Tasks Related to Selecting Sports Teams

This set of tasks draws on the context of choosing teams for various sporting events. Students might have experiences participating in school or community sporting teams that could be leveraged for learning with these tasks. The tasks engage students in mathematical modeling (Mathematical Practice 4) through activities including:

  • Evaluating various athletic attributes.
  • Prioritizing attributes in choosing teams.
  • Determining how to choose fair teams.
  • Measuring performance over time.
  • Determining whether maximum or minimum measures are advantageous.
  • Communicating plans, models, and creating a persuasive data-based argument with tables, pictures, numbers, and/or words.

Specific mathematical content and other mathematical practices connected to tasks are described within the lesson overview of each task.

Selecting Sports Team Tasks

Soccer Task Overview

The Soccer Team Task asks students to create “fair” soccer teams by analyzing given player information including data in the form of whole and decimal numbers and non-numeric data. Students must determine how to use the data and write a letter to the coach explaining their process for creating fair teams.

Student Task Documents

We are including both PDF and MSWord versions of the Student Task document. The MSWord version will allow you to easily edit the task if you wish to do so. The PDF version will maintain the original format.

Lesson Slides

The Lesson Slides include a launch to promote discussion about the different skills a soccer team needs.

Two YouTube video links are included to support discussion and understanding of those skills.

Soccer Task Resource Files

Student Work

Work file includes grades 3 and 4 student work products for the Soccer Team Task.

Student Work File

Soccer Team Student Work.pdf

Swimming Task Overview

In this task students use data from past swim meets to determine who should swim in the championship meet. Task standards focus on using tabular data, ordering whole (grade 3) and decimal (grades 4 and 5) numbers, determining criteria for their selection process and explaining their process to others.

Student Task Documents

There are two versions of the student task. The Grade 3 version uses whole number race times and the Grade 4,5 version uses decimal times rounded to the nearest 100th. We are including both PDF and MSWord versions of the Student Task Document. The MsWord version will allow you to easily edit the task if you wish to do so. The PDF version will maintain the original format.

Lesson Slides

The Lesson Slides provide a launch for the lesson and includes a short video related to preparing for the Olympics produced by the Canadian Swim Team. You might want to use video from a local swim meet if one is available.

Swimming Resource Files