Roanoke Valley Governor’s School Math Madness Gets National Attention
Your shot at Warren Buffet’s billion dollars may be over, but one quest for the perfect, or at least better, bracket is putting the national spotlight on one Roanoke Region school. CBS News featured a math program at the Roanoke Valley Govenor’s School focused on the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament.
Picking up on a story by local affiliate WDBJ-TV, CBS News ran the story on the homepage of their website. The piece features the unique way the Governor’s School implements the real-world applications of linear algebra using the NCAA tournament as a bracket as a learning tool.
“I’m not a big basketball fan, but, teaching seniors in the spring, you have to have something that’s exciting that’s also educational to keep them motivated, and this seems to work,” Linda Gooding, the classes instructor told CBS. “It’s really applying math in a fun way for something that they all are interested in – the March Madness”
The students are tasked with picking the best brackets based on mathematical models, the same process students at Davidson, Georgia Tech, and Princeton use to predict their brackets. The brackets are then compared and pitted against the others in the class. The winner is awarded an A, and has bragging rights among their classmates.
The Roanoke Region is known for its Acclaimed Higher Education with over 25 colleges and universities in the area, but now the high school STEM teachings of the region are also drawing national attention. This innovative way to teach the material, while also keeping it fun to hold students’ attention is what puts the Roanoke Region on the cutting edge of education.